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" Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age, such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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" I used to live in a village, and I always loved listening to old people. Unfortunately, it was always women who were talking, because after the war, very few men were around. I spent my entire life living in the village. The village is always talking about itself; people are talking to each other as the village makes sense of itself. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" '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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I don't think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Freedom is not an instantaneous holiday, as we once dreamed. It is a road. A long road. We know this now. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" For money, I can buy one thing: I buy freedom. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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

" I believe that in the 21st century, we should arm ourselves with ideas. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" To be in conflict with the authorities is one thing. We Russian writers have got used to that. But to be in conflict with your own people - that is truly terrible. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse; it was a shock for everyone. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" There are horrible periods in which entire nations sink into the plague of darkness and hatred. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" The books that I'm writing, you can write them only when you're amongst your people. You're not going to find it on the Internet. You're not going to hear it there. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I take a very long time to write my books - from five to ten years. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I name the genre that I write in as 'novel of voices.' "

Svetlana Alexievich

" We were romantics in the 1990s and thought that communism was dead. But 10 years passed, and Putin came, and it became obvious that the process is reversible; that communism will, to varying degrees, return again and again. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" I was born in a big city - Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine - but when I was a child, my father moved us back to his homeland in Minsk. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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

Svetlana Alexievich