Olga Tokarczuk Quotes

"In today's world everything is political. We are a statement - our clothes, haircut, the way we act."

"Reality is like a doughnut: Everything that is good and funny and juicy is outside the center, which is just emptiness."

"Everything that was interesting was outside of Poland. Great music, art, film, hippies, Mick Jagger. It was impossible even to dream of escape. I was convinced as a teen-ager that I would have to spend the rest of my life in this trap."

"I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside."

"I think the deepest level of our freedom is being able to change our identity."

"I write books to open people's minds, to present new perspectives, to make people realize that what they think is obvious is not so obvious, that you can look at a trivial situation from a different angle and suddenly reveal other meanings and levels."

"State television, from which a significant number of Poles get their news, consistently smears, in aggressive and defamatory language, the political opposition and anyone who thinks differently from the ruling party."

"I believe absolutely that words must be treated as material weapons, every invective or threat as violence and aggression."

"We know so much about planets and the universe and small particles and we do not know anything about the inner state of our own bodies, we do not know about this microcosm we have inside our skin."

"I got my first passport in 1989, when I was 28."

"Polish literature can be interesting to the world. I'm happy to be the trailblazer."

"I would like to say to my friends in Poland: Let's make good choices, vote for democracy."

"It's impossible to be ethnically pure."

"We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories."

"Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication."

"In a healthy, normal society, people can disagree with one another, even have diametrically opposing views, and this does not at all mean that they must hate one another. The Polish authorities, however, have made the division of Poles their primary task."

"When I was a teenager I fell in love with TS Eliot."

"I like to come back to the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem. He is comforting but also funny, and although I know his books, there's always something new to discover."

"I found that traveling on my own created a different state of mind because when you travel with your partner or a friend there is an endless tendency to exchange information, feelings and associations."

"I love crossing borders."

"I think I always have many ideas for books in my head. It's like a forest full of mushrooms. Some are big, some are small."

"Seeing everything means recognizing the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us."

"I've never been a great fan of crime fiction. I read Agatha Christie in my youth, but that's all."

"We invented a history of Poland as a tolerant, open country, a country that has not been tainted by any atrocities committed against its minorities."

"But sometimes I fear that the people of my country can unite only beside victims' bodies, over coffins and in cemeteries. Like tribesmen who dance around old totems, we ignore the living and can only appreciate the dead."

"I didn't believe that the Soviet Union would ever break down."

"Anglo-Saxons have a view that history is ordered and chronological, and I think that fed into the development of the realist middle-class novel. You know, the ones you read on your sofa with a nice cup of tea."

"To write is to look for very particular, specific points of view on reality."

"In a certain sense we can be proud to have introduced this hairstyle to Europe. 'Plica polonica' should be added to the list of our inventions, alongside crude oil, pierogi and vodka."

"Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate."