Karl Ove Knausgard

“The world is material. We are always in a certain place. Now I am here.”

— Karl Ove Knausgård

I have never been interested in presenting myself.

— Karl Ove Knausgard

I have a longing for fiction - to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.

— Karl Ove Knausgard

Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.

— Karl Ove Knausgard

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her 'b's.”

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“Go somewhere you know nothing about and see what happens.”

— Karl Ove Knausgård

As a person, I'm polite - I want to please.

— Karl Ove Knausgard

“I asked him whether he was still with the woman he had met, whose name I didn’t even know. ‘No, I’m not,’…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“The thought of this could sometimes weigh me down because I wanted so much to be someone. I wanted so much to…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

I have some friends, most of them are writers or editors, whose recommendations I trust blindly. There are some critics, too, whom…

— Karl Ove Knausgard

For me, personally, it is very important that the days are exactly the same, so I have routines. I do the same…

— Karl Ove Knausgard

I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate…

— Karl Ove Knausgard

In 'Min Kamp,' I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read.

— Karl Ove Knausgard

“that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world.”

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“The problem is not so much that the world limits your imagination as your imagination limits the world.”

— Karl Ove Knausgård

In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my…

— Karl Ove Knausgard

When I started out on 'Min Kamp', I was so extremely frustrated over my life and my writing. I wanted to write…

— Karl Ove Knausgard

National identity is a motion. It's something you're inside, you don't get what's happening, you can't see it from above. And that's…

— Karl Ove Knausgard

I don't know why people do not read 'Mein Kampf' more regularly. It tells you first-hand about all the narcissism; you see…

— Karl Ove Knausgard

The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there…

— Karl Ove Knausgard

“When I look at a beautiful painting I have tears in my eyes, but not when I look at my children. That…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

I don't talk about feelings, but I write a lot about feelings. Reading, that's feminine; writing, that's feminine. It is insane -…

— Karl Ove Knausgard

If you are disappearing from yourself, but you're still writing, then there is a kind of activity of thinking going on, which…

— Karl Ove Knausgard

“It was a very special feeling to wake up in the morning, all alone in a flat, it was as though emptiness…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

The tree was so old, and stood there so alone, that his childish heart had been filled with compassion; if no one…

— Karl Ove Knausgard

“Our days are open and transparent, but enveloped too by the faintest membrane of time, almost imperceptible when our gaze passes through…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“Oh, this is the song about the young man who loves a young woman. Has he the right to use such a…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

And it's a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality…

— Karl Ove Knausgard

“But Dad was no longer breathing. That was what had happened to him, the connection with the air had been broken, now…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“An essay course started at the Academy, I wrote about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, one of the books I was really…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“De er ikke nære venner, jeg er ikke god nok til å snakke med folk til å ha nære venner, og så…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“A lot happens in our everyday life, but it always happens within the same routine, and more than anything else it has…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“We were nobodies, two young lit. students chatting away in a rickety old house in a small town at the edge of…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“Modernist literature with all its vast apparatus was an instrument, a form of perception, and once absorbed, the insights it brought could…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“the past is now barely present in my thoughts. I believe the main reason for that is our children, since life with…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“As your prospective of the world increases, not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“What a stupid, fucking, idiotic country this was. All the young women drank water in such vast quantities that it was coming…

— Karl Ove Knausgård