There is no official censorship in literature, but I feel a certain fear when I see that a kind of self-censorship is developing in Poland. Authors are somehow afraid of expressing what they really think or feel because they fear political consequences.
— Olga Tokarczuk
I believe in literature which ties people together, that highlights what people have in common, despite the differences - color, sexual orientation, or anything which may separate us on the surface.
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 don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.
Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.
I adore Stanley Kubrick, all of his films were different, not just in subject but tonally.
I'm not one of those people who easily judges something or someone.
The views I have, the books I write, are read as political, or even as manifestos.
The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.
A novel should tell a story, be a pleasure to read, and at the same time it should be thought-provoking, even a bit instructive.
When we talk about books, we rarely talk about the economic side of writing, especially of writing literary works, and that, at base, it's a pretty costly enterprise.
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.
I think the deepest level of our freedom is being able to change our identity.
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 first read Sigmund Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' as a young girl, and it helped me to understand that there are thousands of possible ways to interpret our experience, that everything has a meaning, and that interpretation is the key to reality. This was the first step to becoming a writer.
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.
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 would like to say to my friends in Poland: Let's make good choices, vote for democracy.
From death's perspective, there are no differences between people; there are no presidents or flight attendants, no faiths or nations. There is just the person, always dear.
Novels can change attitudes. Maybe we should speak quietly otherwise politicians will use novels as propaganda.
I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.
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.
Education, school should prepare us not to morally judge everyone, but to be able to find our own truth in this world of various points of view.
I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.
The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it's a black-and-white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost, turning into nothing but gray shapes.
I've never been a great fan of crime fiction. I read Agatha Christie in my youth, but that's all.
I tell stories and try to do it honestly so that people are interested and enjoy them.
My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.
Reality is like a doughnut: Everything that is good and funny and juicy is outside the center, which is just emptiness.
I found Leonora Carrington's 'The Hearing Trumpet' really funny.
Polish culture has always had a strong anti-Semitic undercurrent. There has been awful persecution.
Flights' grew out of a time when I was travelling a lot.
I believe in a kind of literature which makes clear that, at a deeper level, below the surface, we are tied together through invisible but existing threads. A kind of literature which talks about a lively, ever-changing world of unity, of which we are a small, but not insignificant part.
I try to do my job and be a decent person, and a decent person has the courage to face what is not necessarily pleasant, what is perhaps dark and troublesome.
I dream of Poland becoming a modern society that is defined not by the crippling nature of history, but by our individual achievements, a sense of our own self-worth and ideas for the future.
Two centuries ago, when our nation lost its sovereignty and was partitioned among Russia, Prussia and Austria, Polish Romantics like the poet and nationalist Adam Mickiewicz declared that independence would come only with great sacrifice. Ever since, this myth of the martyr, or messianic victim, has emerged during times of national crisis.
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.
But the fact is we did have colonies in the east of Poland, we did have a slave economy there. But this is not common knowledge - or part of our national myth. It goes against the current romanticised view of the government, and much of the country, that Poles have always been victims, never oppressors.
The English book world is relatively closed to translation, so only a small amount of foreign language work can come in.
In today's world everything is political. We are a statement - our clothes, haircut, the way we act.
How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.
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.
I decided to write a crime novel. That genre was at the height of its popularity in Poland, so I thought it might earn me a bit of cash to go on with my work on 'The Books of Jacob.' I shut myself away for a few months and devoted myself entirely to 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.'
I create doubt in the reader's mind. That is what literature is for: to provoke, to raise doubts, to talk about things that are not obvious.
I realized that we don't travel in such a linear way anymore but rather jump from one point to another and back again. So I got this idea for a 'constellation' novel recounting experiences that were separate from each other but could still be connected on different psychological, physical and political levels.
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.
When I was a teenager I fell in love with TS Eliot.
Poland was once a powerful imperial country that disappeared from maps of Europe for more than 100 years. It was partitioned and occupied by the Nazis and the Russians... We pop up and disappear and we do not trust what we are told to believe.
