Quotes from Karl Ove Knausgard

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 is to deny me to write my family's story?' I have hurt people, but I don't think in a dangerous way. But you can't tell.

My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.

In my experience, when you're writing, you want the truth, and you don't want to be apologetic in any way. But there is something in writing, the complexity of it, that works against that aim.

The notion of what is public and what is private has been dissolved. My children see documentaries; they see Instagram. Everyone is very open: it has become less taboo to expose lives.

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

All I needed to know, all true knowledge, the only really essential knowledge, was to be found in the books I read and the music I listened to

My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn't write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing.

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.

I do think readers should respect my privacy, but I don't get angry when I get personal questions, because I understand why.

When I started out on 'Min Kamp', I was so extremely frustrated over my life and my writing. I wanted to write something majestic and grand, something like 'Hamlet' or 'Moby Dick,' but found myself with this small life - looking after kids, changing diapers, quarreling with my wife, unable to write anything, really.

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.

On the floor by my bed, there are heaps of books I want to read, books I have to read, and books I believe I need to read.

'My Struggle' came from a place of questioning and feelings of inauthenticity and frustration, and almost all of that is gone.

Knut Hamsun's writing is magical. His sentences are glowing; he could write about anything and make it alive. Of contemporary writers, Thure Erik Lund is my definite favorite.

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

You can write a radical Norwegian or a conservative Norwegian. And when I changed to a conservative Norwegian, I gained this distance or objectivity in the language. The gap released something in me, and in the writing, which made it possible for the protagonist to think thoughts I had never myself thought.

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

When I was younger, I wondered if it was possible to be a good person and a writer.

I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.

I have some friends, most of them are writers or editors, whose recommendations I trust blindly. There are some critics, too, whom I trust, but not many.

I do feel guilty. I do. Especially about my family, my children. I write about them, and I know that this will haunt them as well through their lives. Why did I do that to them?

I don't know why people do not read 'Mein Kampf' more regularly. It tells you first-hand about all the narcissism; you see that collapse in German culture. There is no chance that anyone could become a Nazi by reading that book.

When I started writing 'My Struggle,' my father was still an issue: someone I had in me every day, someone I would dream about - he was still a part of me. He was such a huge figure for me, and now he is just one among many, and that feels like a relief.

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