Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

I'm usually very attracted to things that I can't define. If something's too clear, it's very often not inspiring to me anymore.

Write about the things that attract you. Choose your subjects the way you used to choose your toys: out of desire.

I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.

My mom would take me to restaurants, and the first thing I'd ask for would be a pen and a napkin, and I'd sketch shoes and shoes and shoes.

Certain things come to me; I just become intrigued by them and want to live inside them.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.

I suppose an artist takes the elements of his life and rearranges them and then has them perceived by others as though they were the elements of their lives.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

Photography acts as a teaser, suggesting we can know something that we can never know. And the more we can't obtain it, the more we want it.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.

I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Modeling isn't boring.

My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me.

Some music comes from a real place; some music comes from your imagination. It's difficult to find out what's real and what's not, especially with the gangster stuff.

Art is not in some far-off place. A work of art is the expression of a man's whole personality, sensibility and ability.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic.