Olga Tokarczuk Quotes

You're sort of programmed a certain way because of your environment. That's all you know. But we don't have that anymore because of the internet. Because of the internet we're all communicating with each other all across the board, so you're getting information from people all around the world, hitting a much more diverse slice of culture.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

Entertainment is one of America's greatest exports. And the stories that we tell about people inform the world about how to think about people.

We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.

A huge amount of our everyday thinking - powerful, creative, and resonant stuff - is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying on them to recall information for us.

The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.

We're living in an age where we should be collaborating. Because it's the Internet now. It's hard to say who owns what.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

Fortunately, the world is full of people with information compulsion who want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you don't know. They're some of the greatest allies that any writer has.

One cannot be independent of the deep thinking of the people.

No experience exists unless it's a shared one.

We're all connected, related, part of one another's lives through the stories we tell ourselves and each other. For good and for bad.

My existence is fuller of other people's experiences than my own. If they cut open my brain, these are what I would retain most.

There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period.

The strongest human instinct is to impart information, the second strongest is to resist it.

You can have your beliefs, but if you're not devout, you can't quite believe that something which grows out of a story, a book or a piece of literature can rise to dominate and make entire nations go to war with each other. I think that's endlessly fascinating, and it's a human construct. It's something that's constructed to occupy the mind and occupy society, and some people would say to control society.

I am anxious to give away information, for it is only by giving it away that you can keep it. When you have told it, you remember it. It is with information as it is with liberty, the only way to be dead sure of it is to give it to other people.

I'm open to meet any person; I think we can learn from one another.

The principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge.

Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate.

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.

Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.

History will only ever be partial, to a large extent history tells us what we think should be remembered and what should be forgotten, I find that really problematic.

Washington and Hollywood spring from the same DNA.

We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.