Olga Tokarczuk Quotes

I like being forced to think about things in a different way.

I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses.

Have an open mind - allow different ideas into your way of thinking.

My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly imaginative, but if I look for things in different places, sometimes things happen.

The best way to renew thought is to go outside the human imagination.

I'm constantly asking for alternative views on most things that come to me.

Do I take alternative points of view? Yes, because all the media are going in another direction.

I believe in being completely open to the most unlikely explanation.

Resist the temptation to subject yourself only to that which re-affirms what you already think.

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.

Now, that is in a way also what scientists are trying to do they're trying to get people to see that the world can be represented in an alternative way and that it's right.

It is okay to be an outsider, a recent arrival, new on the scene - and not just okay, but something to be thankful for... Because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons, can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province.

These are ideas. I could say that they just came to me, but it would be more accurate to say that I went to them. Ideas - and new connections between ideas - lead you away from commonly held perceptions of reality. Ideas lead you out here. Ideas lead you into the darkness.

I'm always trying to turn things upside down and see if they look any better.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.

I'm good at thinking outside the box, so much that you realise it's not a box to begin with.

We can't get any new thinking because we can't get any new thinkers.

Americans do not want to think that there is an alternative to what we have. Therefore, as soon as you say 'fascism' or whatever it might be, then the American response is to say 'no' because we lack the categories that allow us to think outside of the box that we are no longer in.

I just want to open people's eyes to different things.

What might we learn from lines of research that are off the beaten track? They check accepted ideas, always a good thing, and there is the chance nature has prepared yet another surprise for us.

I like my mind being stimulated. I like discovering new concepts.

The secret of innovation is to see what all see but think what none think

Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.

Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.