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.
— Karl Ove Knausgard
When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Having a writer in the family is a curse - for the family. I do feel more or less guilty when I'm writing.
I am happy because I am no longer an author.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The difficult thing for me is that I want basically to be a good man. That's what I want to be.
I have a longing for fiction - to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.
Those small things, like giving a hug to man, I try to avoid it. Because I can see the situation is coming, and I try to prepare. But I remember the first time I did it, I was 16, and I was at the gymnasium, and it was a cosmopolitan thing, an international thing, a modern thing, but I never felt at ease with it at all.
When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.
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.
Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, 'The Birds' - it is absolutely wonderful: the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.
I spent six years after my first novel and five years after my second without getting into a new book.
In 'Min Kamp,' I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read.
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.
I do think readers should respect my privacy, but I don't get angry when I get personal questions, because I understand why.
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 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.
The eye of God ends up inside, so that, in the end, you take care of judgment and punishment yourself.
Is literature more important than hurting people? You can't argue that. You can't say it. It's impossible.
It's one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It's another to have it captured in writing.
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.
As a person, I'm polite - I want to please.
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.
'My Struggle' came from a place of questioning and feelings of inauthenticity and frustration, and almost all of that is gone.
I have never been interested in presenting myself.
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.
When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.
When you use the form of a novel, and you say 'I,' you are also saying 'I' for someone else. When you say 'you,' you are simultaneously in your room writing and in the outside world - you are seeing and being seen seeing, and this creates something slightly strange and foreign in the self.
When I was younger, I wondered if it was possible to be a good person and a writer.
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?
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.
Concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value.
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.
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.
Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.
Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.
