Henning Mankell Quotes

When I got to 40 or so... I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on, and many that I had no control over whatsoever.

For the first half of your life, people tell you what you should do; for the second half, they tell you what you should have done.

I think it's natural as you get to the end of your twenties to start thinking about what you could have done differently - whether they went well or whether they went terribly.

When you get older, it's not about what you did that you regret, it's what you didn't do.

I don't have a seller's remorse about how I've lived.

I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on and many that I had no control over whatsoever.

The idea of regretting not doing this seemed insane to me. Sitting in the corner at a bar at age 60, saying: 'I could've been Bond. Buy me a drink.' That's the saddest place I could be. At least now at 60 I can say: 'I was Bond. Now buy me a drink.'

You write your life story by the choices you make. You never know if they have been a mistake. Those moments of decision are so difficult.

Every man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal liking.

If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably live the same way.

I think the last thing you want in life is to live with regret.

I know so many people who have tremendous regret in their life.

When you make bad decisions bad things happen. And it was so simple. You know, the decisions you make are going to become the life that you live!

Sometimes you want to experience life, but ultimately, you've got to make sacrifices and choose the right road.

You know, in life there are only three or four fundamental decisions to make. The rest is just luck.

There's nothing about my life that I would have changed.

Sometimes you get to a place in life where you feel you've made some choices, and maybe they weren't the right choices, and that it's all coming to an end.

Now that I'm feeling the responsibilities of adulthood, the choices we make become an incredible weight.

Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot... they don't know what's going to happen to them.

I learnt a lot about myself, I learnt a lot about other people and the problems they have. If I was lucky enough to live to a hundred, how I will feel about two per cent of my life being that way, I don't know.

I started with the firm conviction that when I came to the end, I wanted to be regretting the things that I had done, not the things I hadn't.

If I was starting off now, I would probably have taken one or two different turnings along the way.