I was so obsessed by Lisbeth Salander and all the characters, but of course if you're going to write a crime novel worthy of Stieg Larsson, you need a plot, don't you?
— David Lagercrantz
If you have an extreme character, you need normal characters to contrast them. Sherlock Holmes certainly needed a Dr. Watson. And Pippi Longstocking, who supposedly inspired Lisbeth Salander, needed Tommy and Annika, the normal middle-class neighbors.
There is no money in the world that would compensate me for writing a lousy book.
I'm not a secretive guy. I'm talkative.
You have to search for the best writer - I'm not saying I'm the one, but it's a bad idea to just find the person who is a copycat of Stieg Larsson.
Alan Turing is such an amazing, tragic story.
I've always been interested in people who think out of their time, and I have this passion, actually, for science. I'm just so enormously interested in how, when you think of these revolutionary ideas, other people get threatened, especially if you are different.
I wrote about Alan Turing, the great mathematician and code-breaker. He was an absolutely different person, certainly more brilliant than I ever will be.
Of course I want to be a best seller because I'm in the business and I want to be read, but there is no money in the world that can compensate for writing badly.
The beautiful thing is I have sort of grown up. I don't care if I'm highbrow or not anymore.
I have the deepest respect for Eva Gabrielsson and all she has gone through, but I also know that I make maybe her sad, and I am sad about that, but I make so many other people happy.
I'm an author who likes assignments, who needs suggestions, ideas I would never have thought of otherwise - then something happens inside my alien head. Other people have to decide whether or not I'm a good writer, but I do have the ability to write in different styles.
All I wanted to do was to follow my passion and tell a good story.
I want to have new challenges and write new crazy books because I think it makes me a better writer to be insecure and try new things.
I want to be read, and I certainly want to sell, but I also see my father's eye from Heaven: 'Always write quality. It doesn't matter if you sell; if it's good, it's good - if you capture the complexity of life.'
A conventional crime story is simple - it's just a corpse in the river or something, and a detective with an alcohol problem.
We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.
I'm always interested in talented or odd people, and my whole life I've written about geniuses who society has treated badly and they strike back - or not.
Part of the brilliance of Stieg Larsson's books is that they are so complex, so many different facets coming together.
I said from the start I had to be trustful of the Millennium universe. It was not going to be a Stieg Larsson book, but my interpretation of his iconic characters and universe.
The real demon in my life is my father.
My father was highbrow: writing long biographies of Dante and stuff like that. Ghostwriting sportsman memoirs? That was sort of the lowest of the low.
I write best when I sort of collide myself with another man. So I think, I hope, that a combination of me and Stieg Larsson will create something good.
I'm very bad at violence in real life. I can't stand it. And I'm so fed up with crime novels that have too much violence. I can't really do it. It's unnecessary.
A supervillain must continue to exist.
I met a lot of hackers, and some of them were very arrogant. They thought I was stupid because I couldn't follow what they were talking about. But then I met this great guy whom companies hire to find their security holes, and he was very good about explaining so I could understand.
The capacity of computers is doubling every eight months. It's exponential development. I think it's a real threat, actually, that a computer one day will be more intelligent than us.
I have this reporter's temperament still in me - I thrive under pressure.
My father was this huge, influential intellectual in the '60s and '70s. He was one of the main players in the cultural discussion in Sweden, the editor of papers.
All great characters, great icons, in literature are a bit of a riddle, and that's the reason we go back to them over and over.
We must fight intolerance, racism and the far-Right.
I know I don't want to be Stieg Larsson my whole life.
I'm a strange kind of author - I like assignments. I wasn't clever enough to invent an iconic figure like Salander, but she's my kind of girl.
I'm ashamed to say that I'm from a very privileged background.
My life as an author has always been about brilliant, odd people.
