Norwegian - Author | December 6, 1968 -
When I look back at that freedom of childhood, which is in a way infinite, and at all the joy and the intense happiness, now lost, I sometimes think that childhood is where the real meaning of life is located, and that we, adults, are its servants - that that's our purpose.
Karl Ove Knausgard
LifeHappinessFreedomChildhoodJoy
The difficult thing for me is that I want basically to be a good man. That's what I want to be.
GoodManMeGood ManWantDifficult
My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn't write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing.
WritingFreeEndBadWhat IfWrite
It's one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It's another to have it captured in writing.
WritingStupidInsideOne Thing
You can write a radical Norwegian or a conservative Norwegian. And when I changed to a conservative Norwegian, I gained this distance or objectivity in the language. The gap released something in me, and in the writing, which made it possible for the protagonist to think thoughts I had never myself thought.
MyselfMeThoughtsWritingThink
My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.
MemoryPeopleMeRememberLetters
As a person, I'm polite - I want to please.
PersonWantPleasePolite
I have a longing for fiction - to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.
BelieveTryFictionDisappear
Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.
SayingBelieveYouWantLyingHear
I have this habit to bow my head, as to look shorter, maybe as a result of an unconscious demand of not taking up so much space.
HabitSpaceResultLookHeadUp
Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.
LifeLiteratureChangesMotionForms
Is literature more important than hurting people? You can't argue that. You can't say it. It's impossible.
PeopleImpossibleLiteratureYouSay
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