Olga Tokarczuk

In today's world everything is political. We are a statement - our clothes, haircut, the way we act.

I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.

In a certain sense we can be proud to have introduced this hairstyle to Europe. 'Plica polonica' should be added to the list of our inventions, alongside crude oil, pierogi and vodka.

Everything that was interesting was outside of Poland. Great music, art, film, hippies, Mick Jagger. It was impossible even to dream of escape. I was convinced as a teen-ager that I would have to spend the rest of my life in this trap.

I didn't believe that the Soviet Union would ever break down.

I'm too neurotic to be a therapist.

State television, from which a significant number of Poles get their news, consistently smears, in aggressive and defamatory language, the political opposition and anyone who thinks differently from the ruling party.

Unfortunately, as hate speech has proliferated, no one in Poland has been held responsible. The police take people's statements and dismiss them. This tacit consent has demoralized weakened minds.

In a healthy, normal society, people can disagree with one another, even have diametrically opposing views, and this does not at all mean that they must hate one another. The Polish authorities, however, have made the division of Poles their primary task.

We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.

We know so much about planets and the universe and small particles and we do not know anything about the inner state of our own bodies, we do not know about this microcosm we have inside our skin.

Poland was once a powerful imperial country that disappeared from maps of Europe for more than 100 years. It was partitioned and occupied by the Nazis and the Russians... We pop up and disappear and we do not trust what we are told to believe.

Polish culture has always had a strong anti-Semitic undercurrent. There has been awful persecution.

My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.

I like to come back to the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem. He is comforting but also funny, and although I know his books, there's always something new to discover.