Knausgaard Quotes & Sayings

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

We might believe that our world embraced everything, we might do our thing down here on the beach, drive around in our cars, phone each other and chat, visit one another, eat and drive and sit indoors imbibing the faces and opinions and fates of those appearing on the TV screen in this strange, semi-artificial symbiosis we inhabited and lull ourselves for longer and longer, year upon year, into thinking that it was all there was, but if on the odd occasion we were to raise our gaze to this, the only possible thought was one of incomprehension and impotence, for in fact how small and trivial was the world we allowed ourselves to be lured by? Yes, of course, the dramas we saw were magnificent, the images we internalized sublime and sometimes also apocalyptic, but be honest, slaves, what part did we play in them? None. — Knausgaard, Karl Ove

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

I am happy because I am no longer an author. — Karl Ove Knausgaard

Who's that?" Yngve said, nodding discreetly in the direction of a woman. She wore a hat with a veil that concealed her face. "No idea," I said. "But all self-respecting funerals have a woman no one recognizes." We laughed. "Well, the danger's over now," Yngve said, and we both laughed again. — Knausgaard, Karl Ove

All that usually drew my eyes in his direction, for our entire life together, everything he had done, been, and said, that which made up "Dad" and was immanent in him, or in my view of him, whatever his appearance, all that was suddenly gone. He looked like a drunk who had put on a suit. He looked like an alcoholic his family had picked up, cleaned up, and taken along. — Knausgaard, Karl Ove

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 had never imagined that happiness could hurt so much. — Knausgaard, Karl Ove

Is literature more important than hurting people? You can't argue that. You can't say it. It's impossible. — 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

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

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

Was it Jesus you saw a picture of?" he says and looks up at me. If it had not been for the friendly voice and the long pause before the question, I would have thought he was making fun of me. He finds it a little embarrassing that I am a Christian; all he wants is for me not to be different from the other kids, and of all the kids in the neighbourhood, his youngest son is the only one to call himself a Christian.
But he is really wondering about this.
I feel a flutter of joy because he actually cares, and at the same time I become a bit offended that he underestimates me like that.
I shake my head.
"It wasn't Jesus," I say. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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

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

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

this was not the end of the world, actually it was the world. — Knausgaard, Karl Ove

I was the kind to endure. No one had said you couldn't become a better person through endurance. — Knausgaard, Karl Ove

I have a longing for fiction, to try to believe in it and to disappear into it. — Karl Ove Knausgaard

Our spirits rose after a few beers, all that lay between us during the day, the silences that could develop from nowhere, the irritation that could set in, the sudden inability to find areas of common interest, even though there were so many, all of that vanished as our spirits soared and we felt the concomitant warmth: we looked at each other and knew who we were. — Knausgaard, Karl Ove

I was the son of the man who had ruined everything. — Knausgaard, Karl Ove

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

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

For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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

Concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value. — Karl Ove Knausgaard

Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not. — Karl Ove Knausgaard