Tag Archives: Karl Ove Knausgard

Concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value. Karl Ove Knausgard

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. Karl Ove Knausgard

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. Karl Ove Knausgard

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. […]

Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not. Karl Ove Knausgard

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

I spent six years after my first novel and five years after my second without getting into a new book. Karl Ove Knausgard

As a person, I'm polite – I want to please. Karl Ove Knausgard

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. Karl Ove Knausgard

I have never been interested in presenting myself. Karl Ove Knausgard