Quotes from Svetlana Alexievich

I can't rid myself of the feeling that war is a product of the male nature.

I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion.

I name the genre that I write in as 'novel of voices.'

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.

I see the world as voices, as colors, as it were. From book to book, I change, the subjects change, but the narrative thread remains the same.

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.

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.

People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death.

I love to sit on my own and think, not to be photographed all the time.

Reality has always attracted me like a magnet; it tortured and hypnotized me. I wanted to capture it on paper.

'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.

A man without a memory is only capable of doing evil, nothing else but evil.

When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time

There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.

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.

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.

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.

I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being and how I can protect this humanity in a person.

I do not remember any questions in my childhood other than questions about death and about loss, and it was clear that the books that filled the house were not as interesting as the conversations outside.

I grew up in the countryside.

In the West, people demonize Putin. They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West. There is a little piece of Putin in everyone.

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

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.

For me, people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes.