Journalists do not write about human feelings.
— Svetlana Alexievich
What is life about? Two things: love and death.
The books that I'm writing, you can write them only when you're amongst your people. You're not going to find it on the Internet. You're not going to hear it there.
We need a philosophy for humans and nature to live together.
Women are the most denigrated social group in the Soviet Union. The idea of women's emancipation is only a slogan in - but also, I should say, in many places outside - the Soviet Union. But especially in the militaristic Soviet society, people only thought of life in terms of struggle and the workers' toil.
I don't love great ideas. I love the little human being.
Lukashenko is very much like Trump, because democracy and Trump are incompatible things.
For me, people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes.
We were romantics in the 1990s and thought that communism was dead. But 10 years passed, and Putin came, and it became obvious that the process is reversible; that communism will, to varying degrees, return again and again.
In apartments and cottages, on the street and in the train... I listen... More and more, I turn into one large ear, always turning to another person.
I don't want to be like other authors and say that there are only a few story lines in literature. A story is like a human face. We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they're all a little different.
I used to live in a village, and I always loved listening to old people. Unfortunately, it was always women who were talking, because after the war, very few men were around. I spent my entire life living in the village. The village is always talking about itself; people are talking to each other as the village makes sense of itself.
There is this tradition, stretching back to Tacitus and Plutarch, that history belongs to the heroes, the emperors. But I grew up among simple people, and their stories just shattered me. It was painful that no one but me was listening to them.
Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic.
I write my books at moments of shock. I meet people in extremis and their stories are highly emotionally charged.
There are horrible periods in which entire nations sink into the plague of darkness and hatred.
'Women's' war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. There are no heroes and incredible feats; there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.
I will never write fiction.
I believe that in the 21st century, we should arm ourselves with ideas.
I'm interested in love and in death. Everything evolves from these things.
Humans have occupied a position in nature that they should not. It is impossible for humans to conquer nature.
We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs.
What you have to remember about Belarus is that it's a small state - it has a population of less than 10m people - and like many small states, it has to be very careful about its relationships.
Every one of his characters has their own idea, their own thing they want to express. Dostoevsky just lets them do it.
No book about Soviet sacrifice was as strong as the women's stories I heard as a child.
Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves.
A man without a memory is only capable of doing evil, nothing else but evil.
I was always meant to study the humanities; I was no good at math or sciences. When it came time for me to work, it was Soviet times, and journalism wasn't that free or interesting of a space. There was a lot of censorship; it was difficult.
I'm not a public person.
To be in conflict with the authorities is one thing. We Russian writers have got used to that. But to be in conflict with your own people - that is truly terrible.
Communism has not died. We naively thought in the '90s we had buried communism, but this is not true. It is not dead, and it will be coming back.
Hatred will always give birth to more and more hate, and love has the power to demolish the borders between us.
Hatred, I think, is an organism that penetrates our skin in a mythic fashion and does not leave.
I have always grappled with the fact that the truth cannot be packaged into one soul or one mind alone. It is something fragmented: there is so much to it; the truth is varied and scattered across the world.
When I was a child, women spoke to me of how all they had was their memories, how their husbands went to war and never came back, so many tragedies. That chorus of voices filled my consciousness. It was part of life itself.
Being in the public eye is easy for me because I come from a family of four generations of teachers, so I'm used to being around books and discussions. But to write, I very much need to be alone.
All our lives, we fight for certain ideals, and they get diluted, and then we have to fight for them again.
America is a remarkable country, but I have a feeling that it's a different country after 9/11.
People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death.
Showing just the dark side doesn't always work. The important thing is to show what we can learn from dark things, what good we find there.
My writing is not just all facts and voices. I strive to create a text that works as a sign, pointing out undercurrents that lie beneath the facts.
I love how humans talk.
I can't rid myself of the feeling that war is a product of the male nature.
You might say that my work is just simply lying on the ground, and I go and I gather it, and I pick it up, and I put it together.
My Ukrainian grandmother would tell amazing stories. She lost her father, and as children, we would always listen to her stories.
I love to sit on my own and think, not to be photographed all the time.
There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on.
Putin has mobilized and gathered the desires of millions upon millions of people who have been lied to, cheated, who lost out in the new order of things - and in each of these people is a bit of Putin. They have come together to make the image we know as Putin. Putin himself is just the tip of an iceberg.
We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.
It's very important to listen when someone is speaking up. I always keep my ear to the ground.
