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 where you have to write. You can't see what's happening now or what's going to happen, so you… — Karl Ove Knausgard Copy Share Image
When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the… — Karl Ove Knausgard Copy Share Image
“When I look at a beautiful painting I have tears in my eyes, but not when I look at my children. That does not… — Karl Ove Knausgård Copy Share Image
“I was a wannabe who was actually unable to write because I had nothing to say, who wasn’t honest enough with himself to draw the appropriate conclusions and was therefore trying to get a foot in the world of literature at any cost. Not as someone who created something himself, someone who wrote and was published, but as a parasite,… — Karl Ove Knausgård Copy Share
I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the… — Karl Ove Knausgard Copy Share Image
A problem with my novels is that they, from the start, have been infantile and incredibly childish. There are childishness, stupidity, lack of wisdom,… — Karl Ove Knausgard Copy Share Image
In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and… — Karl Ove Knausgard Copy Share Image
“Writing isn't black magic. You just have to come up with an idea...” — Karl Ove Knausgård Copy Share Image
“It was a fantastic feeling, but it left me restless because the most important thing in it was the longing, for what was going… — Karl Ove Knausgård Copy Share Image
“the past is now barely present in my thoughts. I believe the main reason for that is our children, since life with them in the here and now occupies all the space. They even squeeze out the most recent past: Ask me what I did three days ago and I can’t remember. Ask me what Vanja was like two years… — Karl Ove Knausgård Copy Share
“I loved it, I loved the feeling, it was my favorite feeling, but it never led to anything good, and the day after or the days after, it was as closely associated with boundless excess as with stupidity, which I hated with a passion. But when I was in that state, the future did not exist, nor the past, only… — Karl Ove Knausgård Copy Share
“Actually there were only two forms of existence, I reflected: one that was tied to a place and one that wasn't. Both had always… — Karl Ove Knausgård Copy Share Image
