A novel should tell a story, be a pleasure to read, and at the same time it should be thought-provoking, even a bit instructive.

I think I always have many ideas for books in my head. It's like a forest full of mushrooms. Some are big, some are small.

I believe absolutely that words must be treated as material weapons, every invective or threat as violence and aggression.

Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate.

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.

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

We invented a history of Poland as a tolerant, open country, a country that has not been tainted by any atrocities committed against its minorities.

There is no official censorship in literature, but I feel a certain fear when I see that a kind of self-censorship is developing in Poland. Authors are somehow afraid of expressing what they really think or feel because they fear political consequences.

When I was a teenager I fell in love with TS Eliot.

If your country is wiped off the map and your language is banned, if your literature has to serve a cause, it becomes, however brilliant, rather hard to travel.

To write is to look for very particular, specific points of view on reality.

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'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.

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.

I love crossing borders.

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

Flights' grew out of a time when I was travelling a lot.

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

I first read Sigmund Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' as a young girl, and it helped me to understand that there are thousands of possible ways to interpret our experience, that everything has a meaning, and that interpretation is the key to reality. This was the first step to becoming a writer.

I found Leonora Carrington's 'The Hearing Trumpet' really funny.

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.

I found that traveling on my own created a different state of mind because when you travel with your partner or a friend there is an endless tendency to exchange information, feelings and associations.

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 write books to open people's minds, to present new perspectives, to make people realize that what they think is obvious is not so obvious, that you can look at a trivial situation from a different angle and suddenly reveal other meanings and levels.

I tell stories and try to do it honestly so that people are interested and enjoy them.

When we talk about books, we rarely talk about the economic side of writing, especially of writing literary works, and that, at base, it's a pretty costly enterprise.

I've never been a great fan of crime fiction. I read Agatha Christie in my youth, but that's all.

Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.

The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it's a black-and-white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost, turning into nothing but gray shapes.

How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.