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 … - Olga Tokarczuk

I write fiction, but it is never pure fabrication. When I write, I have to feel everything inside myself. I have to let all the living beings and objects that appear in the book go through me, everything that is human and beyond human, everything that is living and not endowed with life. I have to take a close look at each thing and person, with the greatest solemnity, and personify them inside myself, personalize them.

Art is a huge space for cognitive and conscious experiments, and it uses different sorts of efforts to describe reality. Tale, fairy tale, metaphor, parable are tools that literature has been using for centuries.

I don’t want to sketch an overall vision of crisis in telling stories about the world. But I’m often troubled by the feeling that there is something missing in the world―that by experiencing it through glass screens, and through apps, somehow it becomes unreal, distant, two-dimensional, and strangely non-descript, even though finding any particular piece of information is astoundingly easy.