Knausgard Books Quotes & Sayings

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as
drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. — Erich Fromm

An essay course started at the Academy, I wrote about Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, one of the books I was really passionate about, alongside Bram Stoker's Dracula, and even though they didn't fall into the category of literature the teachers favoured and taught, I still received some praise from Fosse, he said my language was tight and precise, my arguments solid and interesting and that I obviously had a talent for non-fiction. The praise was two-edged: did it mean that my future lay in literature about literature and not in literature itself? — Karl Ove Knausgard

We live in the best of worlds. But still, it's like we've lost something on the way to here: a sense of life. I can't know for sure, I might be the only one who's lost it. Maybe everybody else is living the now, thinking they're having it well. Anyhow, that motivated me to write the books. — Karl Ove Knausgard

That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature's other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these take control over form, the result is poor. That is why writers with a strong style often write poor books. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Attributing to another author, Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep. — Karl Ove Knausgard

The next day we moved my things, that is to say all my books, which had now grown to number two and a half thousand titles, a fact which Anders and Geir, who were helping me with the move, cursed from the bottom of their hearts as we shifted the boxes from the lift into the flat. — Karl Ove Knausgard

All I needed to know, all true knowledge, the only really essential knowledge, was to be found in the books I read and the music I listened to — Karl Ove Knausgard

The code that most prisoners live by is an extension of the masculine roles they were taught growing up, how they were conditioned about what it means to be a man: you've got to be strong, you've got to be tough, you've got to be in charge. — James Fox

Forget not that thy marriage, thy wealth, thy life are not for sense-pleasure, are not for thy individual personal happiness. — Swami Vivekananda

If you believe in yourself enough and know what you want, you're gonna make it happen. — Mariah Carey

Sometimes it is given to us. One moment of clarity. One word laid down, cold and clattering, beside another. Ribbon of wet stone. — John Gilmore

To drink is to warm the heart; without dispelling reason, it gives reason to life. — Jose Maria Peman

He pulled me up into the world of advanced literature, where you wrote essays about a line of Dante, where nothing could be made complex enough, where art dealt with the supreme, not in a high-flown sense because it was the modernist canon with which we were engaged, but in the sense of the ungraspable, which was best illustrated by Blanchot's description of Orpheus's gaze, the night of the night, the negation of the negation, which of course was in some way above the trivial and in many ways wretched lives we lived, but what I learned was that also our ludicrously inconsequential lives, in which we could not attain anything of what we wanted, nothing, in which everything was beyond our abilities and power, had a part in this world, and thus also in the supreme, for books existed, you only had to read them, no one but myself could exclude me from them. You just had to reach up. — Karl Ove Knausgard

I was writing a story, 'The Artistic Career of Corky,' about two young men, Bertie Wooster and his friend Corky, getting into a lot of trouble, and neither of them had brains enough to get out of the trouble. I thought: Well, how can I get them out? And I thought: Suppose one of them had an omniscient valet? — P.G. Wodehouse

the intensity was so great that sometimes life felt almost unlivable, and when nothing could give me any peace of mind except books, with their different places, different times, and different people, where I was no one and no one was me. That — Karl Ove Knausgard

There are too many good comic book writers out there. I'd rather remain a fanboy. — Simon Kinberg