Henning Mankell Quotes

I realize that Facebook today is a global success with more than 600 million users worldwide. But I also understand, maybe a bit sadly, that it is not for me. Perhaps it is because I am a bit too old? Or perhaps it is because I am more interested in exploring the epic text, which I have lived with for all my life.

You think you know everything about a person, but the truth often comes as a surprise.

We live in an age when the mice are hunting the cats ... nobody knows who are the mice and who the cats.

Many years ago Wallander had learned that one of the manifold virtues a police officer must possess is the ability to be patient with himself.

The great Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose once said, liberally translated, the only things worth writing about are love and murder.

When I was a very young author, I knew I needed to build myself a tower outside of Europe. Like when you're a hunter, and build towers to watch the animals move. I knew I would never understand the world without that perspective. I came to Africa for that rational reason, although I love Mozambique now.

Once more they had left their own time for another age. The age of Bellman, the bacchanalian 18th-century poet.

Despite everything, I've tried to take responsibility for my life, and not merely allowed it to float away at the mercy of whatever current came along.

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!

He took a sheet of paper out of a desk drawer. But what would he write? The day's work had hardly involved more than collecting a large number of question marks.

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.

There's no reality without battles and no future without fights.

His definition of friendship had been grounded on the lowest common denominator, an absence of animosity. He

Self-preservation was more important than revenge, and

If a policeman is serious about his profession but says he has time, he lies.

Just as no significant work of art can be created without the element of irrationality that is in fact the artist's talent." p.179
"He wondered if there was a greater distance than the one between two people in the same bed pretending to sleep." p.213

Go to Mozambique! As long as you don't expect to find flawless infrastructure, just go. Because this is a country where people have not quite grown accustomed to tourists. You still feel a genuineness that no longer exists in countries where tourism has been industrially developed.

Africa was a place of yearning to me even. As a child, whenever I watched the logs swim down the Ljusnan towards the ocean, I imagined they were crocodiles. This is the luxury of childhood - children trust their fantasy unconditionally. In school, reality becomes more important. If, later in your life, you decide to become an artist, you have to regain this lost skill. At least that is how it was for me. A few years ago I was in Sveg again - and you know what?
I could still see the crocodiles.

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.

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.

Our ancestors survive somewhere in our faces, she thought. If you look like your mother as a child, you end up as your father when you age. When you no longer recognise your face, it's because an unknown ancestor has taken up residence for a while.

As a writer, I am an intellectual. I believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment, I believe in the written word, in dialogue and in truth. I hate lies more than anything else. Most of the time I react by writing.

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.

He had been working with some of them for over fifteen years. It occurred to him that these were people who made up the content of a large proportion of his life. He was now the one who had been working longer than anybody else in the Ystad CID. Once upon a time he'd been the newcomer.

China is a poor country. The economic development everybody talks about has only benefited a limited part of the population. If this way of leading China into the future continues, with a gap between the rich and the poor growing wider all the time, it will end up in catastrophe. China will be thrust back once more into hopeless chaos. Or fascist structures will become dominant. We are defending the hundreds of millions of peasants who, when all's said and done, are the ones whose labor is producing the wealth on which developments are based. Developments they are benefiting from less and less.

Somewhere in the dark a vast meaninglessness was beckoning to him. A grinning face that laughed scornfully at all his vain attempts to manage his life.

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 still have a photo on my wall of the greatest idol I will ever have in my life, and it's myself at eight. Because that's when the forces of imagination have the same value as the real world, when they're an instrument of survival: when my mother disappeared, and I imagined a mother. That was me at my best.

The game had started. Everybody was assuring everybody else how reliable they were. In fact, nobody trusted anybody but themselves

History can never give us exact knowledge of what will happen in the future: rather, it shows us that our ability to prepare ourselves for change is limited.

The evil always comes from details.

I work every day until I do not have more to say. I learned from Graham Greene that a very good way is to stop work in the middle of a sentence. Then you know exactly how to continue the day after.

In a way that starry night sky is a mirror in which we see our own faces.

We used to send whole flocks of birds shooting out of our mouths and never managed to grab them by their wings.

I am constantly reminded that we human beings are basically storytellers. More homo narrans than Homo sapiens. We see ourselves in others' stories. Every genuine work of art contains a small fragment of glass from a mirror.

All the Wallander books are basically a discussion on the relationship between democracy and the system of justice.

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.

One must occasionally stand the world on
its head in order to put it on its feet.

I will baptise her," he said. "You have walked a long way for something you believe in. In our day that is rare. People seldom walk long distances for their faith. That's why the world looks the way it does.

I know paradise has many gates, just as hell does. One has to learn to distinguish between them, or one is lost.

Pride was dangerous and could make you vulnerable.

To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child.

It was only in the Western world that old people were viewed with indulgence or contemptuous sympathy. In other cultures, age was respected as the period of enlightened wisdom.

He had never been particularly inclined to philosophical meditation. He had never felt a need to delve into himself. Life was a continual interplay among various practical questions awaiting a solution. Whatever was out there was something inescapable which he could not affect no matter how much he worried about some meaning that probably didn't even exist. Having a few minutes of solitude was another thing altogether. It was the vast peace that lay hidden in not having to think at all. Just listen, observe, sit motionless.

impossible planning, strange priorities and a continual lack of information.

The fundamental driving force for me is to create a change in the world we live in ... It is about exploitation, plundering and degradation. I have a small possibility to participate in the resistance. Most of the things that I do are part of a resistance, a form of solidarity work.

We only have the past that we have. Not all of our deeds were incorrect.

Those who contemplate never escape the doubt.

An African who loses the ability to die with dignity is a lost man.

Novels are ... an unsurpassed form to understand people.

Each person searches for the most beautiful jump which will be the final before leaving this world.

Hate can blind people in the same way envy can. Or jealousy. - Kurt Wallander

Some people give theirselves a certain number of white weeks once in a year, when they do not drink a single drop of alcohol. It is really wise. I myself have a few weeks per year, let us call them white or black, when I am not interested in the world around. When I come back from this isolation of the news, I realize that I have missed nothing significant. We live in the rain of disinformation and rumors, where the truth is a very small number. In those weeks of dissociation I seek for knowledge that lies within me.

Every secret we confide in another
person can be a burden to them

there was no such thing as past or future. There was no time that could be lost or won. The only thing that counted was action.

Society had grown cruel. People who felt they were unwanted or unwelcome in their own country, reacted with aggression. There was no such thing as meaningless violence. Every violent act had a meaning for the person who committed it. Only when you dared accept this truth could you hope to turn society in another direction.

Many people say I smile more in Africa than in Sweden.

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.

Africa was the most exotic place I could conceive of - the end of the world - and I knew I would go there one day.

the remnants of a person's life inevitably ended up at the nearest dump.

What annoys a person who suicides? The life itself. Boredom. Tiredness that descends on every morning when you look at yourself at the mirror.

I can't deal with angry people until after I've had my morning coffee.

Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe.

Letters ... People do not write the truth; they write the things that, they believe, you would like to read.

Burning churches associate with war. But here there are churches burning in peacetime. Can a country be engaged in an invisible war against an unseen enemy?

Too often we learn everything about how an African dies, but nothing about how he lives. But they learn and live and love and dream just like we do. That's not to say there are not a hell of a lot of problems in Africa. But there is also another side to that story.

God allowed no mistakes.

Certainly, I know what it's like to be obsessed. I haven't always been there for my children. They could reach me, but I wasn't always there. But, you know, that's not necessarily anything to do with being a writer. I mean, a taxi driver could have the same problem ... Maybe.

It's impossible to talk to a madman wisely, Wallander thought helplessly.

When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.

Criminals in a hurry are always the easiest to trace, Lundstr

It is obviously no secret that I earn a lot of money. But it is also no secret that I give most of it away. I don't live a luxurious life. I drive a small second-hand Fiat. I don't have to worry about money, which is itself a privilege. But I never had any anxiety that I would lose my identity.

You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions.

Sorrow and respect didn't follow a color scheme.

It was the most important art a person could learn: self-control.

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.

It was a clear, starry night, dead calm. Whenever I see a sky
like that, I wish I could write music

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.

Have I ever written anything that has really changed something? What I believe is that you can't change anything without using art. I believe that the drops wear away the stone. I try to be part of that army.

Having the possibility to make decisions about what to do with one's life is a great privilege. As far as most people on this planet are concerned, life is simply about survival.

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.

A question that wasn't asked was a question that didn't need an answer.

Fighting crime is simply a question of endurance; about which side can outlast the other.

We're living as if we were in mourning for a lost paradise, he thought. As if we longed for the car thieves and safecrackers of the old days, who doffed their caps and behaved like gentlemen when we came to take them in. But those days have irretrievably vanished, and it's questionable whether they were ever as idyllic as we remember them.

Who ever said police work was supposed to be fun?

My father thought, and now I think too, that the system of democracy is entirely based upon the system of justice. If we do not have a system of justice that people believe in, the system of democracy will fail.

It occurred to Wallander that no matter when death comes, it disrupts everything. Death always arrives at the wrong time - something is left undone.

You have a good father." She was taken aback.

Linda grabbed an ashtray from the table and threw it at him, hitting him right above the eyebrow. Blood ran down his face and dripped on Harriet Bolson's file.

More and more people were being judged useless and were being flung to the margins of society, where they were destined to look back enviously at the few who still had reasons to be happy. He

Well, I believe that life is very complicated. And in a way, the only way you can show life in a truthful way is to show how complicated it is as an individual, but also your relation between a complicated life and the complications you have inside you.

He could feel his stomach churning. I'm repressing things, he thought. Along with everything else I don't have time for. I'm searching for the slayers of the dead and can't even manage to pay attention to the living. For a dizzying instant his entire consciousness was filled with only one urge. To take off. Flee. Disappear. Start a new life.

There will always be new opposites, class struggles and uprisings. History has no ending.

But then an old man was discovered impaled in a ditch, and once again his world had started crumbling away beneath his feet. He wondered how long he could keep this up.

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.

The truth lies in poverty and simplicity.

I thought it went without saying that when the Soviet Union collapsed and the eastern states opened up, we would be plagued by a new kind of criminality in Sweden and Western Europe. And that is what happened.

Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.

The
experience he'd gained during his years in the police force
had given him this unambiguous answer: there are no
murderers. Only ordinary people who commit murder

On the one hand, everything is connected, on the other hand, it is not.