Top 90 Henning Mankell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A criminal investigation is like a construction site. Everything has to be done in the proper order or the building won’t hold up.”

— Henning Mankell

2. “The evil always comes from details.”

— Henning Mankell

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

— Henning Mankell

4. “People always leave traces. No person is without a shadow.”

— Henning Mankell

5. “Police work wouldn’t be possible without coffee.”

— Henning Mankell

6. “An oppressed people will always rise.”

— Henning Mankell

7. “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

8. “They pondered the importance of coffee in silence.”

— Henning Mankell

9. “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

10. “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

11. “Not everything can go according to the plan.”

— Henning Mankell

12. “New love might replace an earlier love, but the old love is always there, no matter what. You live your life on two levels, probably to avoid falling through without a trace if a hole appears in one of them.”

— Henning Mankell

13. “We don’t have time to argue. Nobody has time.”

— Henning Mankell

14. “Justice doesn’t only mean that the people who commit crime are punished. It also means that we can never give up seeking the truth.”

— Henning Mankell

15. “My mother did what many men do. She left.”

— Henning Mankell

16. “Life is a flimsy branch over an abyss.”

— Henning Mankell

17. “I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.”

— Henning Mankell

18. “Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening.”

— Henning Mankell

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Each person searches for the most beautiful jump which will be the final before leaving this world.”

— Henning Mankell

22. “You think you know everything about a person, but the truth often comes as a surprise.”

— Henning Mankell

23. “For me Oliver Twist is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions.”

— Henning Mankell

24. “Dreams can be of value even if you don’t have an opportunity to turn them into reality.”

— Henning Mankell

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

— Henning Mankell

26. “I remembered her once saying that life was like your shoes. You couldn’t simply expect or imagine that your shoes would fit perfectly. Shoes that pinched your feet were a fact of life.”

— Henning Mankell

27. “Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and ‘Hamlet’ would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.”

— Henning Mankell

28. “I know paradise has many gates, just as hell does. One has to learn to distinguish between them, or one is lost.”

— Henning Mankell

29. “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

30. “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.”

— Henning Mankell

31. “I am constantly reminded that we human beings are basically storytellers. More homo narrans than Homo sapiens. We see ourselves in others’ stories. Every genuine work of art contains a small fragment of glass from a mirror.”

— Henning Mankell

32. “Life is like a pendulum. It swings back and forth between pain and relief. Without ceasing, endless. She.”

— Henning Mankell

33. “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

34. “There was a sort of beauty that only comes with age. A whole life engraved into facial wrinkles.”

— Henning Mankell

35. “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

36. “The truth lies in poverty and simplicity.”

— Henning Mankell

37. “Children get acquainted with each other in a special way, they do not make contracts as adults, they believe each other or not. Childish friendships often end in violence. You may become an enemy all of a sudden as well as notice that you are someone’s best friend.”

— Henning Mankell

38. “Our exile organizations have been our way of replacing the cities and villages we have lost.”

— Henning Mankell

39. “We can never make sense of death,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t obey any laws or follow any rules. Death is an intractable anarchist.”

— Henning Mankell

40. “Many people say I smile more in Africa than in Sweden.”

— Henning Mankell

41. “We used to send whole flocks of birds shooting out of our mouths and never managed to grab them by their wings.”

— Henning Mankell

42. “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

43. “It’s only when we can work with something that brings out our strengths that we’re of any real use.”

— Henning Mankell

44. “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

45. “In a way that starry night sky is a mirror in which we see our own faces.”

— Henning Mankell

46. “Africa was the most exotic place I could conceive of – the end of the world – and I knew I would go there one day.”

— Henning Mankell

47. “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

48. “Every time Wallander stepped into someone’s home, he felt as though he were looking at the front cover of a book that he had just bought.”

— Henning Mankell

49. “The great Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose once said, liberally translated, “the only things worth writing about are love and murder.”

— Henning Mankell

50. “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!”

— Henning Mankell