OLGA TOKARCZUK

Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate.

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.'

I think I always have many ideas for books in my head. It's like a forest full of mushrooms. Some are big, some are small.

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 believe absolutely that words must be treated as material weapons, every invective or threat as violence and aggression.

Unfortunately, as hate speech has proliferated, no one in Poland has been held responsible. The police take people's statements and dismiss them. This tacit consent has demoralized weakened minds.

I adore Stanley Kubrick, all of his films were different, not just in subject but tonally.

I like to come back to the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem. He is comforting but also funny, and although I know his books, there's always something new to discover.

We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.

It's impossible to be ethnically pure.

Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.

I've never been a great fan of crime fiction. I read Agatha Christie in my youth, but that's all.

But sometimes I fear that the people of my country can unite only beside victims' bodies, over coffins and in cemeteries. Like tribesmen who dance around old totems, we ignore the living and can only appreciate the dead.

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.

A novel should tell a story, be a pleasure to read, and at the same time it should be thought-provoking, even a bit instructive.

I dream of Poland becoming a modern society that is defined not by the crippling nature of history, but by our individual achievements, a sense of our own self-worth and ideas for the future.

I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.

The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.

Flights' grew out of a time when I was travelling a lot.

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.

We know so much about planets and the universe and small particles and we do not know anything about the inner state of our own bodies, we do not know about this microcosm we have inside our skin.

Polish literature can be interesting to the world. I'm happy to be the trailblazer.

The views I have, the books I write, are read as political, or even as manifestos.

Polish culture has always had a strong anti-Semitic undercurrent. There has been awful persecution.

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.