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" 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. "

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" The subjects I wanted to write about - the mystery of the human soul, evil - didn't interest newspapers, and news reporting bored me. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Mystery

Human

Evil

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

" I've known since I was five that I wanted to be a writer. "

" I'm not a public person. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Public

Person

" Every one of his characters has their own idea, their own thing they want to express. Dostoevsky just lets them do it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I grew up in a village after the war, and in the village, there were almost only women. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Almost

Only

" I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. "

" 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. "

" We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs. "

" 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. "

" Women tell things in more interesting ways. They live with more feeling. They observe themselves and their lives. Men are more impressed with action. For them, the sequence of events is more important. "

" I will never write fiction. "

" '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. "

" I write my books at moments of shock. I meet people in extremis and their stories are highly emotionally charged. "

" In the post-Soviet era, instead of freedom, various stripes of autocratic-totalitarianism have flourished: Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh... We are finding our way out from under the debris of the 'Red Empire' slowly and tentatively. "

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

" I want to live at home. You can only write at home. "

" We thought we'd leave communism behind, and everything would turn out fine. But it turns out you can't leave this and become free, because these people don't understand what freedom is. "

" Stalin's machine can be started up again at only a moment's notice: the same informers, the same denunciations, the same tortures. The same universal, all-devouring terror. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Only

Again

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills. "

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

" 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. "