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.

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.

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.

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

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

Life is a flimsy branch over an abyss.

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

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

‎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.

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.

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.

An oppressed people will always rise.

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

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.

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

The evil always comes from details.

The stories I create are never as awful as reality.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Children get acquainted with each other in a special way, they do not make contracts as adults, they believe each other or not. Childish friendships often end in violence. You may become an enemy all of a sudden as well as notice that you are someone's best friend.