Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

I study how governments seek to stifle and control online dissent.

While I was writing 'Stick Out Your Tongue' in Beijing, the police began knocking on my door again. As soon as I finished the book, I moved to Hong Kong so that I could work undisturbed on my next novel.

The United States is paradise compared to China, Russia, Ecuador and Cuba, with regard to the press. And with regard to secrecy and transparency.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, if you start the clock, then 47 journalists, reporters, cameramen, photographers have been killed in Russia since the fall of communism. That makes it the third most deadly country on Earth to practice journalism. That's not a record to be proud of.

I ended up doing four or five plays in college and being an English major with my thesis in language acquisition, which I was planning to study in graduate school.

The recent history of Ukraine is replete with dead journalists, beaten journalists, news agencies being shut down, and politicians being injured or killed. Most are killed in mysterious auto accidents.

The aftermath of the war is what inspired us to write many of our plays. The whole reason for our writing Inherit the Wind was that we were appalled at the blacklisting. We were appalled at thought control.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

In general, literature is a natural adversary of totalitarianism. Tyrannical governments all view literature in the same way: as their enemy. I lived for a long time in a totalitarian state, and I know firsthand that horror.

I've thought for the last decade or so, the only actual place raw truth was seeping through in newspapers was on the Comics Pages. They were able to pull off intelligent social comment, pure truths not found elsewhere in the news pages, and had the ability to make it all funny, entertaining, and pertinent.

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.

There is a long tradition in China for writers and journalists to take pen names, partly as protection from retaliation by authorities. If Facebook requires the use of real names, that could potentially put Chinese citizens in danger.

When you have a foreign invasion - in this case by the Indonesian army - writers, intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression.

All the faults of the age come from Christianity and journalism. Christianity, of course, but why journalism?

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

That President Mohammad Khatami's policies have been blocked is the bitterest incident in the contemporary Iranian history. This means that the wishes of millions of people who voted for Khatami and called for freedom and justice have been ignored... Why should cultural activities and journalism be so risky in Iran?

After Newport, I worked in television for a while, and then I went to The Royal College Of Art and did a master's degree. I really did study quite a lot!

I went to school to study literature and writing, even though I didn't end up really doing that in the end.

I have a degree in European history, which didn't necessarily have any direct impact on my career, but I'm grateful I studied something other than acting in college.

I think good books have to make a few people angry.

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

So you have free speech, but you don’t have much to say.

[Describing glasnost:] A media management policy.

Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious.

What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition