Quotes from Henning Mankell

I know paradise has many gates, just as hell does. One has to learn to distinguish between them, or one is lost.

Dreams can be of value even if you don't have an opportunity to turn them into reality.

I remembered her once saying that life was like your shoes. You couldn't simply expect or imagine that your shoes would fit perfectly. Shoes that pinched your feet were a fact of life.

The stories I create are never as awful as reality.

Not having time for a person, not being able to sit in silence together with somebody, that's the same as rejecting them, as being scornful about them.

The evil always comes from details.

Life is a flimsy branch over an abyss.

Every secret we confide in another person can be a burden to them

You can have more than one home. You can carry your roots with you, and decide where they grow.

We don't have time to argue. Nobody has time.

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author." [As quoted in the author biography on Mankell's official website .]

Every time Wallander stepped into someone's home, he felt as though he were looking at the front cover of a book that he had just bought

What annoys a person who suicides? The life itself. Boredom. Tiredness that descends on every morning when you look at yourself at the mirror.

Each person searches for the most beautiful jump which will be the final before leaving this world.

Justice doesn't only mean that the people who commit crime are punished. It also means that we can never give up seeking the truth.

The truth changes all the time.

Among all the nonsense, mistakes, and bad ideas we come up with, maybe some truth will sneak in.

We live in an age when the mice are hunting the cats...nobody knows who are the mice and who the cats.

In a way that starry night sky is a mirror in which we see our own faces.

Police work wouldn't be possible without coffee," Wallander said. "No work would be possible without coffee." They pondered the importance of coffee in silence.

I love Sherlock Holmes. There's still an awful lot to steal from Conan Doyle. But within a tradition you can work in many different ways.

An oppressed people will always rise.

I can still remember. I was ill, and I was seven, and my father didn't want me to just read children's books. He came with Conan Doyle. I tried, and I liked it. I think the first I read was 'The Sign of the Four'; 'Study in Scarlet' was the next one. Then I guess I stayed home a few extra days from school to read.

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.