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"This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession."
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"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."

"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."

"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."

"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."

"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."

"The literary man re-reads, other men simply read."

"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."

"One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters."

"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."

"I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else."
Explore more quotes by Ryszard Kapuscinski


"I remember in 1978 meeting two Ugandan captains in the hotel talking Russian. They had been educated in Moscow and since they came from different Ugandan peoples, it was the only way they could understand one another."


"There are several reasons why Russians view the oppressive state positively. First, in the Russian Orthodox religion, there is an understanding of authority as something sent by God."


"Amin is the shame of the whole world. The fact that he managed to rule so long and commit so many crimes was only possible thanks to the hypocrisy of the East and the West who were waging the Cold War for world domination."


"In modern Russia, you have no official, formal assessment of this past. Nobody in any Russian document has said that the policy of the Soviet government was criminal, that it was terrible. No one has ever said this."


"The official independence celebration was going to be held over four or five days, and a group of journalists from all over the world was allowed to fly in, because Angola was closed otherwise."


"People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War."


"I remember that during the period leading up to independence in Angola in 1975, I was the only correspondent there at all for three months."


"The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed."
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