Reality has always attracted me like a magnet; it tortured and hypnotized me. I wanted to capture it on paper.
Hatred will always give birth to more and more hate, and love has the power to demolish the borders between us.
'Women's' war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. There are no heroes and incredible feats; there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.
Freedom is not an instantaneous holiday, as we once dreamed. It is a road. A long road. We know this now.
There are horrible periods in which entire nations sink into the plague of darkness and hatred.
I see the world as voices, as colors, as it were. From book to book, I change, the subjects change, but the narrative thread remains the same.
I don't want to be like other authors and say that there are only a few story lines in literature. A story is like a human face. We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they're all a little different.
I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time.
I'm interested in the history of the soul: the everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits - or disdains.
I don't hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people... I love Ukraine very much.
It's very important to listen when someone is speaking up. I always keep my ear to the ground.
The books that I'm writing, you can write them only when you're amongst your people. You're not going to find it on the Internet. You're not going to hear it there.
Stalin's machine can be started up again at only a moment's notice: the same informers, the same denunciations, the same tortures. The same universal, all-devouring terror.
Many times, I have been shocked and frightened by human beings. I have experienced delight and revulsion. I have sometimes wanted to forget what I heard, to return to a time when I lived in ignorance. More than once, however, I have seen the sublime in people and wanted to cry.
I have collected the history of 'domestic,' 'indoor' socialism, bit by bit. The history of how it played out in the human soul. I am drawn to that small space called a human being... a single individual. In reality, that is where everything happens.
I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being and how I can protect this humanity in a person.
Humans have occupied a position in nature that they should not. It is impossible for humans to conquer nature.
Lukashenko is very much like Trump, because democracy and Trump are incompatible things.
We were romantics in the 1990s and thought that communism was dead. But 10 years passed, and Putin came, and it became obvious that the process is reversible; that communism will, to varying degrees, return again and again.
Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills.
