Henning Mankell Quotes

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

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

Your memories will be a flock of birds, silently flying in the sky. You will see them flying in and see them flying away. The memories will disappear and there will be nothing left. ~ Henning Mankell

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

I used to go to work every day. Now I climb the walls. ~ Henning Mankell

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

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

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

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

Who ever said police work was supposed to be fun? ~ Henning Mankell

I ask myself everyday what my life is doing to me and I realize I don't have anybody I can talk to."
"You should have" said the Doctor "everybody should. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.
[As quoted in the author biography on Mankell's official website.] ~ Henning Mankell

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 ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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 ~ Henning Mankell

Pride was dangerous and could make you vulnerable. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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

The truth lies in poverty and simplicity. ~ Henning Mankell

The truth changes all the time. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

Key rings rattle throughout history. Each key, each lock has its tale. ~ Henning Mankell

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

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

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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

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

There's no reality without battles and no future without fights. ~ Henning Mankell

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

Life took on quite a special meaning in this early morning solitude. ~ Henning Mankell

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! ~ Henning Mankell

At what point does the normal suddenly become the abnormal? he ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

Big changes don't happen at the battlefield; they are made in closed rooms where very powerful people decide in which direction things should go. ~ Henning Mankell

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

God allowed no mistakes. ~ Henning Mankell

I am fascinated by all the new technology that creates places for us to meet in what is called cyberspace. I understand what it must have meant for the rebellions in the 19th century, especially in 1830 and 1848, when the mass circulated newspaper became so important for the spreading of information. ~ Henning Mankell

He was so excessively polite that Wallendar suspected he had endured many humiliations in his life. ~ Henning Mankell

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

A dead black man - nothing to bother about. ~ Henning Mankell

What doesn't exist you have to create yourself. Even a dream can be plucked out of your head and shaped for a purpose. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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

What we're in is a vacuum. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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

Thanks to the success of Henning Mankell and Peter Hoeg, there wasn't the same stigma attached to writing genre thrillers in Scandinavia as there was in many other cultures. Quite the opposite, in fact. ~ Jo Nesbo

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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

Self-preservation was more important than revenge, and ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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

Dreams can be of value even if you don't have an opportunity to turn them into reality. ~ Henning Mankell

You have a good father." She was taken aback. ~ Henning Mankell

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

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? ~ Henning Mankell

This is what Sweden is - quiet people leaning over the newspapers and coffee cups, each one with his own thoughts and destiny. ~ Henning Mankell

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

The evil always comes from details. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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

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. ~ Henning Mankell

Not everything can go according to the plan. ~ Henning Mankell

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. ~ Henning Mankell

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

Traces of a crime need to be coaxed out, not rushed. ~ Henning Mankell

One can never wait too long. ~ Henning Mankell