List of Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes

The Way We Deny Death Says Something About How We Live Our Lives, Doesn't It? At Least In Sweden Or Scandinavia, You Don't Have To Search Further Back In Time Than Maybe Three Generations To Find Another Way To Relate To Death. People Then Had A Different, Closer Relationship With Death; At Least It Was Like That In The Countryside.

I Never Read The Translation Before Publication. The Most Important Things For Me Is That The Emotion Is Captured In Such A Way That The Feelings That Are In The Original Are There, Much More Than The Details, If They Are Right Or Wrong.

A Problem With My Novels Is That They, From The Start, Have Been Infantile And Incredibly Childish. There Are Childishness, Stupidity, Lack Of Wisdom, Fantasies. At The Same Time, That's Where My Creativity Can Be Found. If I Tried To Control It And Make It More Mature, It Wouldn't Be Good At All. It'd Be Uninteresting, Without Any Vivacity.

If You Are Disappearing From Yourself, But You're Still Writing, Then There Is A Kind Of Activity Of Thinking Going On, Which In My World Is Similar To What's Going On In Music.

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 Myself. But Even When I Do That There's An Element Of Disappearing To A Place That's Not Me. It's "the Selflessness Of Writing". It Seldom Happens, But When It Does It's Worth Quite A Lot.

When I Look Back At What I've Written And Try To Explain It, It Doesn't Help, But It Helps To Be In A Process Of Writing. It's The Same Thing With Reading - You Lose Yourself When You Read As Well. When I Was Younger I Used Literature That Way, It Was Just Escapism, A Tool To Run Away From Things.

You Don’t Think When You Play Music, You Just Try To Play And Be In It. It Is The Same For Me When The Writing Is Going Really Well. It’s The Same Kind Of Feeling. I’m Just In It. It’s Not The Words, It’s Not The Sentences, I’m Not Aware Of It. Then It’s Good.

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 Just Dive Into It And Write.

The Strange Thing About Writing Is That It's So Easy To Write A Novel. It Is Really Easy. But It's Getting There To The Point Where It's Easy That's Hard. The Hard Part Is To Get There.

Shameless Actually Good Since It Gives A Kind Of Freedom. We Consider The Old, Functionless Shame Destructive. Today, If You Have A Strong Sense Of Shame You Also Have A Strong Desire To Overcome It. And That's When You Can Write.

As A Person, I'm Polite - I Want To Please.

Shame Tells You When You've Gone Too Far. Then You Try If It's Okay To Go Too Far. And It Might Be So That Shame Was Right. You Can Never, Never Know That.