Karl Ove Knausgaard

I do feel guilty. I do. Especially about my family, my children. I write about them, and I know that this will…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

The difficult thing for me is that I want basically to be a good man. That's what I want to be.

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

It's one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It's another to have it captured in writing.

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

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

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

When it comes to memories of that iconic type, memories that are burned into you, I have maybe ten or so from…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

I am happy because I am no longer an author.

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

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

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

“Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?”

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

Form is, in a way, death. A novelist's obligation is to break free from the form, even though he knows that this…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

You can write a radical Norwegian or a conservative Norwegian. And when I changed to a conservative Norwegian, I gained this distance…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

“Until I moved to Stockhold I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if it stretched unbroken from childhood…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

“Writing is more about destroying than creating" (195).”

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

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…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

My intention throughout has been to write, to create literature, and to be able to look people in the eye after I'd…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

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

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

The eye of God ends up inside, so that, in the end, you take care of judgment and punishment yourself.

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

“I can’t speak for other writers, but I write to create something that is better than myself, I think that’s the deepest…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

When I look back at that freedom of childhood, which is in a way infinite, and at all the joy and the…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

“Only what slips through one's fingers, only what is never expressed in words, has no thoughts, exists completely. That is the price…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

“I always had a bad conscience whenever vehicles had to stop because of me, a kind of imbalance arose, I felt as…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

Is literature more important than hurting people? You can't argue that. You can't say it. It's impossible.

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn't write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

I have this habit to bow my head, as to look shorter, maybe as a result of an unconscious demand of not…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

I guess I have a talent for humiliation, a place within me that experience can't reach, which is terrible in real life…

— Karl Ove Knausgaard