Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.

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

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.

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.

They pondered the importance of coffee in silence.

I do not understand how on earth you can become a writer without seeing the world.

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!