Top 25 David Lagercrantz Quotes

I’m an author who likes assignments, who needs suggestions, ideas I would never have thought of otherwise – then something happens inside my alien head. Other people have to decide whether or not I’m a good writer, but I do have the ability to write in different styles.

The beautiful thing is I have sort of grown up. I don’t care if I’m highbrow or not anymore.

I have the deepest respect for Eva Gabrielsson and all she has gone through, but I also know that I make maybe her sad, and I am sad about that, but I make so many other people happy.

I know I don’t want to be Stieg Larsson my whole life.

Alan Turing is such an amazing, tragic story.

I’m ashamed to say that I’m from a very privileged background.

I wrote about Alan Turing, the great mathematician and code-breaker. He was an absolutely different person, certainly more brilliant than I ever will be.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

I write best when I sort of collide myself with another man. So I think, I hope, that a combination of me and Stieg Larsson will create something good.

I’m a strange kind of author – I like assignments. I wasn’t clever enough to invent an iconic figure like Salander, but she’s my kind of girl.

My life as an author has always been about brilliant, odd people.

I want to have new challenges and write new crazy books because I think it makes me a better writer to be insecure and try new things.

I’ve always been interested in people who think out of their time, and I have this passion, actually, for science. I’m just so enormously interested in how, when you think of these revolutionary ideas, other people get threatened, especially if you are different.

All great characters, great icons, in literature are a bit of a riddle, and that’s the reason we go back to them over and over.

There is no money in the world that would compensate me for writing a lousy book.

Part of the brilliance of Stieg Larsson’s books is that they are so complex, so many different facets coming together.

I’m very bad at violence in real life. I can’t stand it. And I’m so fed up with crime novels that have too much violence. I can’t really do it. It’s unnecessary.

I’m always interested in talented or odd people, and my whole life I’ve written about geniuses who society has treated badly and they strike back – or not.

My father was highbrow: writing long biographies of Dante and stuff like that. Ghostwriting sportsman memoirs? That was sort of the lowest of the low.

We must fight intolerance, racism and the far-Right.

If you have an extreme character, you need normal characters to contrast them. Sherlock Holmes certainly needed a Dr. Watson. And Pippi Longstocking, who supposedly inspired Lisbeth Salander, needed Tommy and Annika, the normal middle-class neighbors.

A conventional crime story is simple – it’s just a corpse in the river or something, and a detective with an alcohol problem.

The real demon in my life is my father.

You have to search for the best writer – I’m not saying I’m the one, but it’s a bad idea to just find the person who is a copycat of Stieg Larsson.

I have this reporter’s temperament still in me – I thrive under pressure.