Henning Mankell quotes

Henning Mankell was a Swedish writer best known for his crime novels featuring detective Kurt Wallander. His books combined gripping mysteries with social commentary, gaining international acclaim. He inspired a new wave of Nordic noir literature and remains influential in contemporary crime fiction. Here are 38 of his quotes:

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

Henning Mankell

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

Henning Mankell

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

Henning Mankell

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

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

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

Henning Mankell

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

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

Henning Mankell

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

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

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

I am fascinated by all the new technology that creates places for us to meet in what is called cyberspace. I understand what it must have meant for the rebellions in the 19th century, especially in 1830 and 1848, when the mass circulated newspaper became so important for the spreading of information.

Henning Mankell

My mother did what many men do. She left.

Henning Mankell

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

Henning Mankell

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

As a writer, I am an intellectual. I believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment, I believe in the written word, in dialogue and in truth. I hate lies more than anything else. Most of the time I react by writing.

Henning Mankell

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

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

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

Henning Mankell

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

Henning Mankell

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

Henning Mankell

Although I never marched through the streets shouting for Mao, I do believe that the liberation of China at the end of the 1940s was a wonderful thing and to provide its people with a billion pairs of shoes and trousers was a fantastic achievement.

Henning Mankell