Karl Ove Knausgaard Quotes

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 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

“I have a longing for fiction, to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.”

— 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 but something that comes in handy in writing. It seems as though humiliation has become a career for me.”

— 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 these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.

— 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 intention throughout has been to write, to create literature, and to be able to look people in the eye after I'd done it - the people I'd written about.”

— 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 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.”

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

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

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

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

— 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 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.

— 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 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 Knausgaard

“I am happy because I am no longer an author.”

— 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 taking up so much space.”

— 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 haunt them as well through their lives. Why did I do that to them?”

— 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 my childhood. I'm a bad rememberer of situations. I forget almost everything as soon as it happens.”

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

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

— 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

“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.”

— Karl Ove Knausgaard