Quotes from Svetlana Alexievich

I don't think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing.

We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.

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.

I couldn't get published for three years. Then the times changed: glasnost, perestroika. So, for three years, I wasn't allowed to publish 'The Unwomanly Face of War,' but then it changed.

Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in.

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.

I'm interested in the history of the soul: the everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits - or disdains.

I have collected the history of 'domestic,' 'indoor' socialism, bit by bit. The history of how it played out in the human soul. I am drawn to that small space called a human being... a single individual. In reality, that is where everything happens.

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

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.

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.

I don't love great ideas. I love the little human being.

I'm interested in little people. 'The little, great people' is how I would put it, because suffering expands people.

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.

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.

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 don't remember men in our village after World War II: during the war, one out of four Belarusians perished, either fighting at the front or with the partisans. After the war, we children lived in a world of women. What I remember most is that women talked about love, not death.

Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic.

A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive.

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

America is a remarkable country, but I have a feeling that it's a different country after 9/11.

All our lives, we fight for certain ideals, and they get diluted, and then we have to fight for them again.

My father was an important person, the director of the school. He could talk to anybody - simple or educated. He liked chess, fishing, and beautiful women.

I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.