Svetlana Alexievich

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.

The subjects I wanted to write about - the mystery of the human soul, evil - didn't interest newspapers, and news reporting bored me.

'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.

There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on.

I've been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life. I tried this and that, and finally, I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves. But I don't just record a dry history of events and facts; I'm writing a history of human feelings.

From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people.

Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves.

Stalin's machine can be started up again at only a moment's notice: the same informers, the same denunciations, the same tortures. The same universal, all-devouring terror.

Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think - how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness.

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.

What I'm concerned with is what I would call the missing history - the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time.

A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive.

Hatred will always give birth to more and more hate, and love has the power to demolish the borders between us.

Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills.

I've known since I was five that I wanted to be a writer.

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.

All of history misses out on the history of the soul. Human passions are so often not included in history.

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.

Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age, such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire.

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.

No book about Soviet sacrifice was as strong as the women's stories I heard as a child.