Quotes from Olga Tokarczuk

In a certain sense we can be proud to have introduced this hairstyle to Europe. 'Plica polonica' should be added to the list of our inventions, alongside crude oil, pierogi and vodka.

I would like to say to my friends in Poland: Let's make good choices, vote for democracy.

I got my first passport in 1989, when I was 28.

We know so much about planets and the universe and small particles and we do not know anything about the inner state of our own bodies, we do not know about this microcosm we have inside our skin.

I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.

Unfortunately, as hate speech has proliferated, no one in Poland has been held responsible. The police take people's statements and dismiss them. This tacit consent has demoralized weakened minds.

I believe absolutely that words must be treated as material weapons, every invective or threat as violence and aggression.

The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.

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.

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.

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.

Polish literature can be interesting to the world. I'm happy to be the trailblazer.

Polish culture has always had a strong anti-Semitic undercurrent. There has been awful persecution.

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've never been a great fan of crime fiction. I read Agatha Christie in my youth, but that's all.

I love crossing borders.

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.

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.

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.

I think the deepest level of our freedom is being able to change our identity.

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.

When I was a teenager I fell in love with TS Eliot.

We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.

Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate.