Words matter. These are the best Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I do think readers should respect my privacy, but I don’t get angry when I get personal questions, because I understand why.
When you use the form of a novel, and you say ‘I,’ you are also saying ‘I’ for someone else. When you say ‘you,’ you are simultaneously in your room writing and in the outside world – you are seeing and being seen seeing, and this creates something slightly strange and foreign in the self.
I don’t talk about feelings, but I write a lot about feelings. Reading, that’s feminine; writing, that’s feminine. It is insane – it’s really insane – but it still is in me.
When I was younger, I wondered if it was possible to be a good person and a writer.
I have never been interested in presenting myself.
I have a longing for fiction – to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.
When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.
I am happy because I am no longer an author.
It’s one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It’s another to have it captured in writing.
I do feel guilty. I do. Especially about my family, my children. I write about them, and I know that this will haunt them as well through their lives. Why did I do that to them?
The eye of God ends up inside, so that, in the end, you take care of judgment and punishment yourself.
When I wrote my first novel – I was nineteen – I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you’re entering something not yet familiar – a world rather than thoughts about the world.
‘My Struggle’ came from a place of questioning and feelings of inauthenticity and frustration, and almost all of that is gone.
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.
In ‘Min Kamp,’ I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read.
As a person, I’m polite – I want to please.
The notion of what is public and what is private has been dissolved. My children see documentaries; they see Instagram. Everyone is very open: it has become less taboo to expose lives.
When I started writing ‘My Struggle,’ my father was still an issue: someone I had in me every day, someone I would dream about – he was still a part of me. He was such a huge figure for me, and now he is just one among many, and that feels like a relief.
I have some friends, most of them are writers or editors, whose recommendations I trust blindly. There are some critics, too, whom I trust, but not many.
Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.
When I write something, I can’t remember in the end if this is a memory or if it’s not – I’m talking about fiction. So for me, it’s the same thing.
Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, ‘The Birds’ – it is absolutely wonderful: the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.
Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.
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.
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.