"I ask myself what kind of book I want to write about war. I'd like to write a book about a person who doesn't shoot, who can't fire on another human being, who suffers at the very idea of war. Where is he? I haven't met him."

"After reading your book no one will fight," the censor lectured me. "Your war is terrifying. Why don't you have any heroes?" I wasn't looking for heroes. I was writing history through the stories of its unnoticed witnesses and participants. They had never been asked anything. What do people think? We don't really know what people think about great ideas. Right after a war, a person will tell the story of one war, a few decades later, it's a different war, of course. Something will change in him, because he has folded his whole life into his memories. His entire self. How he lived during those years, what he read, saw, whom he met. What he believes in. Finally, whether is he happy or not. Documents are living creatures – they change as we change.

From the Nobel Lecture of Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 laureate in literature, December 7.