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.

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.

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 Knausgard Quotes