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.

People always leave traces. No person is without a shadow.

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.

We don't have time to argue. Nobody has time.

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.

Dreams can be of value even if you don’t have an opportunity to turn them into reality.

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

‎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.

Life is a flimsy branch over an abyss.

You can have more than one home. You can carry your roots with you, and decide where they grow.

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

An oppressed people will always rise.

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 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.

They pondered the importance of coffee in silence.

It’s only when we can work with something that brings out our strengths that we’re of any real use.

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.

Police work wouldn't be possible without coffee.

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

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.

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.

The stories I create are never as awful as reality.

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

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

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

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

Sweden is still a very peaceful country to live in. I think that people in Britain have created this mythology about Sweden, that it's a perfect democratic society full of erotically charged girls.

When one historical period is replaced by another, there is always a group of people left over from the old society

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 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.

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

The evil always comes from details.

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

Our exile organizations have been our way of replacing the cities and villages we have lost.

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

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.

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

I do not understand how on earth you can become a writer without seeing the world.

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

I'm not very much of a reader really, because I find much of it very bad, very uninteresting, very speculative.

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

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

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 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!

My mother did what many men do. She left.

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

He was religious, but had refrained from allowing his religious ideals to be obscured by a god.

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.

Among all the nonsense, mistakes, and bad ideas we come up with, maybe some truth will sneak in.