Karl Ove Knausgaard Quotations

Form is, in a way, death. A novelist's obligation is to break free from the form, even though he knows that this will also be seen as artificial and distanced from life.

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

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

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.

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 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.

I am happy because I am no longer an author.

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.

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.

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