A biography for Karl Ove Knausgardhasn’t been written yet.
“I am happy because I am no longer an author.”
“In my experience, when you're writing, you want the truth, and you don't want to be apologetic in any way. But there is something in writing, the complexity of it, that works against that aim.”
“'My Struggle' came from a place of questioning and feelings of inauthenticity and frustration, and almost all of that is gone.”
“It's one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It's another to have it captured in writing.”
“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.”
“The difficult thing for me is that I want basically to be a good man. That's what I want to be.”
“In 2008, when I wrote Book 1 and Book 2, the head of the publishing house suggested twelve books - one each month. For practical reasons, that didn't work out.”
“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.”
“I'm giving away my family's story. Who owns the family's story? I don't. But you could turn it around and ask, 'Who is to deny me to write my family's story?' I have hurt people, but I don't think in a dangerous way. But you can't tell.”
“As a person, I'm polite - I want to please.”
“The eye of God ends up inside, so that, in the end, you take care of judgment and punishment yourself.”
“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.”
“My intention throughout has been to write, to create literature, and to be able to look people in the eye after I'd done it - the people I'd written about.”
“I guess I have a talent for humiliation, a place within me that experience can't reach, which is terrible in real life but something that comes in handy in writing. It seems as though humiliation has become a career for me.”
“Form is, in a way, death. A novelist's obligation is to break free from the form, even though he knows that this will also be seen as artificial and distanced from life.”
“Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.”
“I do think readers should respect my privacy, but I don't get angry when I get personal questions, because I understand why.”
“When I was younger, I wondered if it was possible to be a good person and a writer.”
“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.”
“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.”