Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes

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Karl Ove Knausgard

Profession : Author

Birth : December 6, 1968

Having a writer in the family is a curse - for the family. I do feel more or less guilty when I'm writing.

Karl Ove Knausgard

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

Karl Ove Knausgard

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?

Karl Ove Knausgard

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

Karl Ove Knausgard

I don't talk about feelings, but I write a lot about feelings. Reading, that's feminine; writing, that's feminine. It is insane - it's really insane - but it still is in me.

Karl Ove Knausgard

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

Karl Ove Knausgard

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.

Karl Ove Knausgard

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.

Karl Ove Knausgard

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

Karl Ove Knausgard

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

Karl Ove Knausgard

In 2008, when I wrote Book 1 and Book 2, the head of the publishing house suggested twelve books - one each month. For practical reasons, that didn't work out.

Karl Ove Knausgard

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

Karl Ove Knausgard

I have this habit to bow my head, as to look shorter, maybe as a result of an unconscious demand of not taking up so much space.

Karl Ove Knausgard

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

Karl Ove Knausgard

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

Karl Ove Knausgard

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.

Karl Ove Knausgard

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.

Karl Ove Knausgard

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

Karl Ove Knausgard

When it comes to memories of that iconic type, memories that are burned into you, I have maybe ten or so from my childhood. I'm a bad rememberer of situations. I forget almost everything as soon as it happens.

Karl Ove Knausgard

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.

Karl Ove Knausgard