Quotes from Olga Tokarczuk

I realized that we don't travel in such a linear way anymore but rather jump from one point to another and back again. So I got this idea for a 'constellation' novel recounting experiences that were separate from each other but could still be connected on different psychological, physical and political levels.

It's impossible to be ethnically pure.

Novels can change attitudes. Maybe we should speak quietly otherwise politicians will use novels as propaganda.

I'm too neurotic to be a therapist.

How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.

I create doubt in the reader's mind. That is what literature is for: to provoke, to raise doubts, to talk about things that are not obvious.

Reality is like a doughnut: Everything that is good and funny and juicy is outside the center, which is just emptiness.

I believe in literature which ties people together, that highlights what people have in common, despite the differences - color, sexual orientation, or anything which may separate us on the surface.

Seeing everything means recognizing the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us.

I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

In today's world everything is political. We are a statement - our clothes, haircut, the way we act.

We invented a history of Poland as a tolerant, open country, a country that has not been tainted by any atrocities committed against its minorities.

My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.

Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.

I decided to write a crime novel. That genre was at the height of its popularity in Poland, so I thought it might earn me a bit of cash to go on with my work on 'The Books of Jacob.' I shut myself away for a few months and devoted myself entirely to 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.'

State television, from which a significant number of Poles get their news, consistently smears, in aggressive and defamatory language, the political opposition and anyone who thinks differently from the ruling party.

The English book world is relatively closed to translation, so only a small amount of foreign language work can come in.

I first read Sigmund Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' as a young girl, and it helped me to understand that there are thousands of possible ways to interpret our experience, that everything has a meaning, and that interpretation is the key to reality. This was the first step to becoming a writer.

Everything that was interesting was outside of Poland. Great music, art, film, hippies, Mick Jagger. It was impossible even to dream of escape. I was convinced as a teen-ager that I would have to spend the rest of my life in this trap.

If your country is wiped off the map and your language is banned, if your literature has to serve a cause, it becomes, however brilliant, rather hard to travel.

I found that traveling on my own created a different state of mind because when you travel with your partner or a friend there is an endless tendency to exchange information, feelings and associations.

I'm not one of those people who easily judges something or someone.

I write books to open people's minds, to present new perspectives, to make people realize that what they think is obvious is not so obvious, that you can look at a trivial situation from a different angle and suddenly reveal other meanings and levels.

I try to do my job and be a decent person, and a decent person has the courage to face what is not necessarily pleasant, what is perhaps dark and troublesome.