Top 100 Henning Mankell Quotes
#1. 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
#2. At what point does the normal suddenly become the abnormal? he
Henning Mankell
#3. 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
#4. Every secret we confide in another
person can be a burden to them
Henning Mankell
#5. 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
#6. Dreams can be of value even if you don't have an opportunity to turn them into reality.
Henning Mankell
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. There will always be new opposites, class struggles and uprisings. History has no ending.
Henning Mankell
#11. Recalling the dream was like trying to follow a ship into fog.
Henning Mankell
#12. Memory is like glass. A person who has died is still visible, very close. But we can no longer contact each other. Death is mute; it excludes conversations, only allows silence.
Henning Mankell
#13. 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
#15. 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
#16. Life took on quite a special meaning in this early morning solitude.
Henning Mankell
#18. in a rash moment he decided to lie his way to the truth. If he wasn't mistaken, Ellen Magnusson had had very little experience with the police. She would assume that they searched for the truth by being honest themselves. She was the one who would lie, not the police.
Henning Mankell
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Criminals in a hurry are always the easiest to trace, Lundstr
Henning Mankell
#22. This is what Sweden is - quiet people leaning over the newspapers and coffee cups, each one with his own thoughts and destiny.
Henning Mankell
#23. If a policeman is serious about his profession but says he has time, he lies.
Henning Mankell
#24. the remnants of a person's life inevitably ended up at the nearest dump.
Henning Mankell
#25. Among all the nonsense, mistakes, and bad ideas we come up with, maybe some truth will sneak in.
Henning Mankell
#26. Every time Wallander stepped into a strange apartment, he felt as though he were looking at the covers of a book he had just bought. The apartment, the furniture, the pictures on the walls, and the smells were the title. Now he had to start reading.
Henning Mankell
#28. 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.
Henning Mankell
#29. Unlike Tania, who was so slim, Rykoff looked as if he'd been given an order to get fat
an order he had been delighted to obey.
Henning Mankell
#31. 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
#32. On the one hand, everything is connected, on the other hand, it is not.
Henning Mankell
#33. 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
#34. He wondered if he was simply starting to crumble under the weight of all the responsibility and was now on a downward trajectory to a point where only fear remained. He
Henning Mankell
#35. Every time Wallander stepped into someone's home, he felt as though he were looking at the front cover of a book that he had just bought
Henning Mankell
#36. 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.
Henning Mankell
#38. The game had started. Everybody was assuring everybody else how reliable they were. In fact, nobody trusted anybody but themselves
Henning Mankell
#40. I do not understand how on earth you can become a writer without seeing the world.
Henning Mankell
#41. There is a special kind of beauty that manifests itself only in the faces of very old women. Their furrowed skin contains all the marks and memories imprinted by a life lived. Old women whose bodies the earth is crying out to embrace.
Henning Mankell
#44. Poverty always looks the same, no matter where you come across it. The rich can always express their opulence by varying their lives. Different houses, clothes, cars. Or thoughts, dreams. But for the poor there is nothing but compulsory grayness, the only form of expression available to poverty.
Henning Mankell
#45. Africa was the most exotic place I could conceive of - the end of the world - and I knew I would go there one day.
Henning Mankell
#46. I intend to die with a bottle of champagne by my bed. I'll drink a toast to the fact that, despite everything, I was able to experience the singular adventure of being born, living and one day disappearing into the darkness once again.
Henning Mankell
#47. We used to send whole flocks of birds shooting out of our mouths and never managed to grab them by their wings.
Henning Mankell
#48. impossible planning, strange priorities and a continual lack of information.
Henning Mankell
#50. A close relationship, she thought. As far as they are concerned, all that means is a threat to which they don't want to expose themselves.
Henning Mankell
#51. Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.
Henning Mankell
#53. It was the most important art a person could learn: self-control.
Henning Mankell
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. The wonderful Mozambican people have endured tremendous misery without losing their dignity and their positive outlook on life. Moreover, they have not lost their will to progress and develop. Mozambique is a country where the people never surrendered.
Henning Mankell
#57. There is always a sacred hour in the theatre - after rehearsals and before performances, in the afternoon, between three and five o'clock. Normally the theatre is empty then, and this is a wonderful hour.
Henning Mankell
#58. In Africa, listening is a guiding principle. It's a principle that's been lost in the constant chatter of the Western world, where no one seems to have the time or even the desire to listen to anyone else.
Henning Mankell
#59. 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.
Henning Mankell
#60. 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
#61. The great Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose once said, liberally translated, the only things worth writing about are love and murder.
Henning Mankell
#62. Many people say I smile more in Africa than in Sweden.
Henning Mankell
#63. He stared down at the empty street and wondered why all city streets resembled each other at night. He
Henning Mankell
#64. What scared him more than anything else was an old age spent simply waiting to die, a time when nothing of what had been his life was still possible.
Henning Mankell
#65. When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.
Henning Mankell
#66. His definition of friendship had been grounded on the lowest common denominator, an absence of animosity. He
Henning Mankell
#67. The truth is never simple. It's only in the Western world that you think knowledge is something you can acquire quickly and easily. It takes time. The truth never hurries.
Henning Mankell
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. It's about contradictions between us and inside us, between individuals and society, between dream and reality. Sometimes these contradictions express themselves in violence, such as racial conflict. And this mirror of crime can take us back to the Greek authors.
Henning Mankell
#72. A question that wasn't asked was a question that didn't need an answer.
Henning Mankell
#73. Self-preservation was more important than revenge, and
Henning Mankell
#74. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people's dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats - and they in turn can listen to ours.
Henning Mankell
#76. It is as if families on the run are shattered by something other than just grenades. The flight and fear tears us apart and those parts land in all kinds of places - we don't even know where. But we always try to find them afterwards.
Henning Mankell
#77. 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
#78. A journalist who doesn't know how to find a phone number no matter how secret it is should change his profession.
Henning Mankell
#79. Key rings rattle throughout history. Each key, each lock has its tale.
Henning Mankell
#80. 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
#81. 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
Henning Mankell
#82. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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.
Henning Mankell
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. I work in an old tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks. You hold a mirror to crime to see what's happening in society. I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things in society.
Henning Mankell
#90. 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
#91. 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.
Henning Mankell
#92. It was a clear, starry night, dead calm. Whenever I see a sky
like that, I wish I could write music
Henning Mankell
#93. 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
#94. One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.
Henning Mankell
#95. Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.
Henning Mankell
#96. Sometimes parents don't know their children, he thought. But sometimes a parent knows her child better than anyone else, and
Henning Mankell
#97. No doubt you thought I was dead. I sometimes think I am myself.
Henning Mankell
#98. 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.
Henning Mankell
#99. 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
#100. You can have more than one home. You can carry your roots with you, and decide where they grow.
Henning Mankell
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
