I wrote a lot of short stories. I’m still interested in this form and I collect ideas for stories on an ongoing basis, even though I’ve recently deve… - Olga Tokarczuk

So it could be best to tell stories honestly in a way that activates a sense of the whole in the reader’s mind, that sets off the reader’s capacity to unite fragments into a single design, and to discover entire constellations in the small particles of events. To tell a story that makes it clear that everyone and everything is steeped in one common notion, which we painstakingly produce in our minds with every turn of the planet. Literature has the power to do this. We should drop the simplistic categories of highbrow and lowbrow literature, popular and niche, and take the division into genres very lightly. We should drop the definition of “national literatures,” knowing as we do that the universe of literature is a single thing, like the idea of unus mundus, a common psychological reality in which our human experience is united. The Author and the Reader perform equivalent roles, the former by dint of creating, the latter by making a constant interpretation.

To make it easier for us to cope with this we are given numbers, name tags, cards, crude plastic identities that try to reduce us to using one small part of the whole that we have already ceased to perceive.

In my opinion, the right to rebellion, to rage, is very important in any person’s psychological development. If you grow and live without the opportunity to stamp your foot, you die inside. This rebellion doesn’t need to take obvious forms like murder, but that remains a potential. The possibility of rebellion makes us free.