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" I live with one foot in the sand and one in the snow. There's European egocentricity, and the African opposite. I normally say that my African experience has made me a better European. "

Henning Mankell

Live

Better

Experience

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" An oppressed people will always rise. "

" Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book. "

" Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe. "

" I think my Wallander stories give a fairly good image of the world in the 1990s. I don't regret anything about that - on the contrary! "

" I came to Mozambique in 1986, when I first became involved with Teatro Avenida - a theatre company that stages plays concerned with political and social issues. "

" I decided to become an author when my grandmother taught me to write, when I was six. I can still recall the sensation of being able to turn words into stories. It was a miracle. "

" My mother did what many men do. She left. "

" Have I ever written anything that has really changed something? What I believe is that you can't change anything without using art. I believe that the drops wear away the stone. I try to be part of that army. "

" The wonderful Mozambican people have endured tremendous misery without losing their dignity and their positive outlook on life. Moreover, they have not lost their will to progress and develop. Mozambique is a country where the people never surrendered. "

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

Henning Mankell

Carry

Roots

" Go to Mozambique! As long as you don't expect to find flawless infrastructure, just go. Because this is a country where people have not quite grown accustomed to tourists. You still feel a genuineness that no longer exists in countries where tourism has been industrially developed. "

" Many people say I smile more in Africa than in Sweden. "

" Normally street children are shown in terms of the tragedy of their lives - which is true - but there's also another dimension: their wisdom, dignity and enormous capacity for survival. "

" I am a very radical person - as radical now as I was when I was younger. So my books all have in common my search for understanding of the terrible world we are living in and ways to change it. "

" In Africa, listening is a guiding principle. It's a principle that's been lost in the constant chatter of the Western world, where no one seems to have the time or even the desire to listen to anyone else. "

" Africa was the most exotic place I could conceive of - the end of the world - and I knew I would go there one day. "

" At the time of independence in 1975, Mozambique was extremely poor. Many Portuguese residents abandoned the country, leaving only a handful of well-educated Mozambicans to try to run the country. "

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

" What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people's dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats - and they in turn can listen to ours. "

" When you are around 60, there are certain things that are completely terrifying. One of them is that you have made the wrong choices in life, and now it's too late to do anything about them. "

" Sweden is still a very peaceful country to live in. I think that people in Britain have created this mythology about Sweden, that it's a perfect democratic society full of erotically charged girls. "

" I would say that during my lifetime, one of the worst political scandals in Sweden was absolutely what happened surrounding the affair of the submarines in Swedish waters in 1982, where there were supposed to be Russian submarines close to Stockholm. And the military of Sweden never got one up. "

" For me 'Oliver Twist' is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions. "

Henning Mankell

Children

Early

" 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. "

" It is obviously no secret that I earn a lot of money. But it is also no secret that I give most of it away. I don't live a luxurious life. I drive a small second-hand Fiat. I don't have to worry about money, which is itself a privilege. But I never had any anxiety that I would lose my identity. "

" Although I never marched through the streets shouting for Mao, I do believe that the liberation of China at the end of the 1940s was a wonderful thing and to provide its people with a billion pairs of shoes and trousers was a fantastic achievement. "

" I work every day until I do not have more to say. I learned from Graham Greene that a very good way is to stop work in the middle of a sentence. Then you know exactly how to continue the day after. "

" When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer. "

Henning Mankell

List

Always

" Well, I believe that life is very complicated. And in a way, the only way you can show life in a truthful way is to show how complicated it is as an individual, but also your relation between a complicated life and the complications you have inside you. "

" As a writer, I am an intellectual. I believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment, I believe in the written word, in dialogue and in truth. I hate lies more than anything else. Most of the time I react by writing. "