Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The evil always comes from details.
An oppressed people will always rise.
Life is a flimsy branch over an abyss.
My mother did what many men do. She left.
We don't have time to argue. Nobody has time.
Police work wouldn't be possible without coffee.
They pondered the importance of coffee in silence.
The stories I create are never as awful as reality.
Many people say I smile more in Africa than in Sweden.
People always leave traces. No person is without a shadow.
Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.
Every secret we confide in another person can be a burden to them
One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.
We only have the past that we have. Not all of our deeds were incorrect.
I do not understand how on earth you can become a writer without seeing the world.
You think you know everything about a person, but the truth often comes as a surprise.
Dreams can be of value even if you don’t have an opportunity to turn them into reality.
When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.
Our exile organizations have been our way of replacing the cities and villages we have lost.
You can have more than one home. You can carry your roots with you, and decide where they grow.
It was a clear, starry night, dead calm. Whenever I see a sky like that, I wish I could write music
It’s only when we can work with something that brings out our strengths that we’re of any real use.
Each person searches for the most beautiful jump which will be the final before leaving this world.
He was so excessively polite that Wallendar suspected he had endured many humiliations in his life.
I'm not very much of a reader really, because I find much of it very bad, very uninteresting, very speculative.
We used to send whole flocks of birds shooting out of our mouths and never managed to grab them by their wings.
I know paradise has many gates, just as hell does. One has to learn to distinguish between them, or one is lost.
To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child.
Africa was the most exotic place I could conceive of - the end of the world - and I knew I would go there one day.
When one historical period is replaced by another, there is always a group of people left over from the old society
Justice doesn't only mean that the people who commit crime are punished. It also means that we can never give up seeking the truth.
Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.
I think my Wallander stories give a fairly good image of the world in the 1990s. I don't regret anything about that - on the contrary!
I love Sherlock Holmes. There's still an awful lot to steal from Conan Doyle. But within a tradition you can work in many different ways.
What annoys a person who suicides? The life itself. Boredom. Tiredness that descends on every morning when you look at yourself at the mirror.
Not having time for a person, not being able to sit in silence together with somebody, that's the same as rejecting them, as being scornful about them.
Police work wouldn't be possible without coffee," Wallander said. "No work would be possible without coffee." They pondered the importance of coffee in silence.
I came to Mozambique in 1986, when I first became involved with Teatro Avenida - a theatre company that stages plays concerned with political and social issues.
What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people's dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats - and they in turn can listen to ours.
I decided to become an author when my grandmother taught me to write, when I was six. I can still recall the sensation of being able to turn words into stories. It was a miracle.
For me Oliver Twist is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions.
Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening.
For me 'Oliver Twist' is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions.
I live with one foot in the sand and one in the snow. There's European egocentricity, and the African opposite. I normally say that my African experience has made me a better European.
I remembered her once saying that life was like your shoes. You couldn't simply expect or imagine that your shoes would fit perfectly. Shoes that pinched your feet were a fact of life.
Normally street children are shown in terms of the tragedy of their lives - which is true - but there's also another dimension: their wisdom, dignity and enormous capacity for survival.
When you are around 60, there are certain things that are completely terrifying. One of them is that you have made the wrong choices in life, and now it's too late to do anything about them.
I am a very radical person - as radical now as I was when I was younger. So my books all have in common my search for understanding of the terrible world we are living in and ways to change it.
I am not afraid of dying. I have lived longer than most people in the world. What scares me is to have a body that works but a brain that is waving goodbye. If that happens, I hope I die quickly.
At the time of independence in 1975, Mozambique was extremely poor. Many Portuguese residents abandoned the country, leaving only a handful of well-educated Mozambicans to try to run the country.