Nesbo Quotes & Sayings

Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores. — Jo Nesbo

Those cunning bastards at Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Dior knew exactly what was required to trap a poor man. She smelled wonderful. — Jo Nesbo

Threats generally work best when delivered in a neutral key. — Jo Nesbo

In any conflict we instinctively take the side of those who look most like us. — Jo Nesbo

Listen, I am someone who had chosen to earn their daily bread killing other people. I'm inclined to give people a bit of leeway when it comes to their actions and decisions. — Jo Nesbo

Ceri loves Sci-Fi - " Game of Thrones "
also - Harry Hole , Lisbeeth Salander, Funky Scando Fiction, Supports Swans, Nirvana, — Jo Nesbo

As a writer, you have to believe you're one of the best writers in the world. To sit down every day at the typewriter filled with self-doubt is not a good idea. — Jo Nesbo

Somehow it felt like everything was missing, and asphalt and the bridge and railway line. He came to the end of the road and then everything turned into nothingness. It's over. How he just hated that word. — Jo Nesbo

A horse perceives eye contact as provocative, as if it and its status in the herd are not being respected. If it cannot avoid eye contact, it will react in a different way, by rebelling for example. In dressage you don't get anywhere by not showing respect, however superior your species might be. Any animal trainer can tell you that. In the mountains in Argentina there's a wild horse which will jump off the nearest precipice if any human tries to ride it. — Jo Nesbo

At nineteen I was pretty sure I was going to be a professional soccer player. At that time I played for one of the Norwegian premier leagues. But I tore ligaments in both knees, so I started studying business administration and economics and became a financial analyst, and I worked at a brokerage firm as a stockbroker. — Jo Nesbo

There's a strong social urge in man to be needed. — Jo Nesbo

I don't think I'll ever feel as famous or as popular as I felt when I was a 17-year-old soccer player in Modle. Only about 20,000 people live there and 12,000 of them come to every game. Running onto the pitch each week was just the most fantastic feeling. Nothing can beat that. — Jo Nesbo

There was only one thing emptier than having lived without love, and that was having lived without pain. — Jo Nesbo

Can you feel it? The vibration? It's the energy from everyone around us. It's in the air. If you're dying and you think no one can save you, just go out and stretch your arms into the air and absorb some of the energy. You can have eternal life. It's true!

- Runa Molnes — Jo Nesbo

longevity bestowed respect, even upon a whorehouse madam if she kept going for long enough. — Jo Nesbo

that it was impossible to get rid of it without — Jo Nesbo

It's strange, but when your father has gone you suddenly discover that the choices you have made were as much for him as for yourself. — Jo Nesbo

The nature of Scandinavians is that they don't talk so much, there will be these dark secrets, and most things are under-communicated. — Jo Nesbo

Harry had felt the gnawing ache for alcohol from the moment he woke up that morning. First as an instinctive physical craving, then as a panic-stricken fear because he had put a distance between himself and his medicine by not taking his hip flask or any money with him to work. Now the ache was entering a new phase in which it was both a wholly physical pain and a feeling of blank terror that he would be torn to pieces. The enemy below was pulling and tugging at the chains, the dogs were snarling up at him from the pit, somewhere in his stomach beneath his heart. God, how he hated them. He hated them as much as they hated him. — Jo Nesbo

Those golden minutes before you are completely awake, when your mind is just drifting, you have no censorship; you are ready to develop any kind of idea. That's when I come up with the best and worst ideas. That is the privilege of being a writer - that you can stay in bed for an hour in the morning and it's work time. — Jo Nesbo

For justice is a blunt knife, both as a philosophy and as a judge. — Jo Nesbo

Harry looked at Bellman. He could not help but admire him. The way you admire a cockroach you flush down the toilet and it comes creeping back again and again and in the end it inherits the world. — Jo Nesbo

How much do you know about noctambulism - in other words, sleepwalking?" "I know that people can walk in their sleep. Talk in their sleep. Eat, get dressed and even go out and drive a car in their sleep. — Jo Nesbo

A moral person is someone who accepts the consequences of their own morality, not those of others. — Jo Nesbo

My father grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., with my grandparents. In Norwegian my name is pronounced 'Yoo' but my father used to call me 'Joe.' — Jo Nesbo

Oh, yes, they're still angry. At Third World aid, cuts in the defence budget, women priests, marriages for homosexuals, our new countrymen, all the things you would guess would upset these old boys. In their hearts they're still fascists. — Jo Nesbo

Four years later, after Mathias had killed a further four women, and he could see that all the murders were an attempt to reconstruct the murder of his mother, he concluded that he was mad. — Jo Nesbo

They maintain he wrote The Art of War. Personally, I believe it was a woman. On the surface, The Art of War is a manual about tactics on the battlefield, but at its deepest level it describes how to win conflicts. Or to be more precise, the art of getting what you want at the lowest possible price. The winner of a war is not necessarily the victor. Many have won the crown, but lost so much of their army that they can only rule on their ostensibly defeated enemies' terms. With regard to power, women don't have the vanity men have. They don't need to make power visible, they only want the power to give them the other things they want. Security. Food. Enjoyment. Revenge. Peace. They are rational, power-seeking planners, who think beyond the battle, beyond the victory celebrations. And because they have an inborn capacity to see weakness in their victims, they know instinctively when and how to strike. And when to stop. You can't learn that, Spiuni. — Jo Nesbo

But perhaps that's why we take snaps ... to provide false evidence to underpin the false claim that we were happy. Because the thought that we weren't happy at least for some time during our lives is unbearable. Adults order children to smile in the photos, involve them in the lie, so we smile, we feign happiness. — Jo Nesbo

We're probably more like our parents than we'd like to believe. — Jo Nesbo

A rat is neither good nor evil. It does what a rat has to do. — Jo Nesbo

Balance is of the essence,' she said. 'That appies to all good, harmonious relationships. Balance in guilt, balance in shame and pangs of conscience. — Jo Nesbo

Well, religion was like fire insurance; you never really thought you'd need it, so when people said that the boy was prepared to take your sins upon himself and didn't want anything in return, why not say yes to some peace of mind? — Jo Nesbo

TV, a Pioneer in the series they had to stop making because it was too expensive, too good for the price they commanded. Truls had got the last one, bought with money he had earned by burning evidence against a pilot who had been smuggling heroin for Asayev. — Jo Nesbo

Some artists see a gig as an audience worshipping them. I think it is about having a great time together. I have a part as the singer. An audience has a part. Playing a gig doesn't make me high on myself. — Jo Nesbo

Did you know that darkness has a taste, Grandma? — Jo Nesbo

No persons or events mentioned in this book should be confused with real persons or events. Reality is far too strange for that. — Jo Nesbo

Scientists still know very little about how the olfactory cortex in the brain converts impulses from receptors into conscious senses of smell. But Harry wasn't thinking so much about the hows, he just knew that when he smelled her, all sorts of things started happening in his head and body. Like his eyelids closing halfway, like his mouth spreading into a broad grin and his mood soaring. — Jo Nesbo

research into why people commit suicide. Do you know what they found the most common cause was?' 'That was the sort of thing I was hoping you could answer.' Harry had to slalom between people on the narrow pavement to keep up with the tubby psychologist. 'That they didn't want to live any longer,' Aune said. 'Sounds like someone deserves a Nobel Prize. — Jo Nesbo

It was as if the demise of the owner had lent the flat a physical void it hadn't had before. At the same time he had the feeling that he wasn't alone. Harry believed in the existence of the soul. Not that he was particularly religious as such, but it was one thing which always struck him when he saw a dead body: the body was bereft of something ... the creature had gone, the light had gone,there was not the illusory afterglow that long-since burned-out stars have. The body was missing its soul and it was the absence of the soul that made Harry believe. — Jo Nesbo

Until the Eighties, Oslo was a rather boring town, but it's changed a lot, and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown, I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries, and to admire the modern architecture such as the Opera House or the new Astrup Fearnley Museum on the water's edge. — Jo Nesbo

Just imagine walking away from something you've started. Something you really believed would be good. I don't think i could ever do that. — Jo Nesbo

You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts, but as a screenwriter, you are a bit down the ladder. — Jo Nesbo

They had studied law, information technology and art history as part of their beauty treatment, they had let Norwegian taxpayers finance years at university just so that they could end up as overqualified, stay-at-home playthings and sit here exchanging confidences about how to keep their sugar daddies suitably happy, suitably jealous and suitably on their toes. — Jo Nesbo

Incidentally, I really agree with those who say that the capacity to forgive says something about the essential quality of a person. I'm the lowest grade.'
'I didn't mean to criticize you.'
'I promise to be better in my next life ... — Jo Nesbo

We don't punish people because they are evil, but because they make bad choices, choices that are bad for the herd. Morality isn't heaven-sent or eternal, just a set of rules that benefit the herd. — Jo Nesbo

Had kicked the chair away from underneath him. That's why he clawed his own neck — Jo Nesbo

When you're an established name, you know that a children's book will have a pretty good chance of getting picked up. Like Madonna. It's not that I had this great idea. Actually, in my case, it was a great idea. — Jo Nesbo

The only pressure I feel is to write good books. And to not replicate the previous book. Whether you have a thousand readers or a million readers it doesn't change the pressure. I never feel tempted to give the reader what I think the reader wants. — Jo Nesbo

Of course we lose them, everyone we try to hold on to, the fates disdain us, make us small, pathetic. When we cry for people we've lost, it's not out of sympathy, because of course we know that they're free from pain at last. But still we cry. We cry because we're alone again. We cry out of self-pity. — Jo Nesbo

Harry went closer and could see she was attractive. And there was something about the relaxed way she spoke, the way she looked him straight in the eye, that suggested that she was also self-assured. A professional woman, he guessed. Something requiring a cool, rational mind. Estate agent, head of a department in a bank, politician or something like that. Well-off at any rate, of that he was fairly sure. It wasn't just the coat and the colossal house behind her, but something in the attitude and the high, aristocratic cheekbones. She walked down the steps as if walking along a straight line, made it seem easy. Ballet lessons, Harry thought. — Jo Nesbo

I was sleeping in a water bed for a couple of years, recommended by my doctor. I was never comfortable in that water bed. In the middle of the night you would hear something happening - water and bubbles. I would always think there was some intelligent life in the water bed. — Jo Nesbo

The second sort was waking up alone. That was characterised by an awareness that he was alone in bed, alone in life, alone in the world, and it could sometimes fill him with a sweet sensation of freedom, and at other times with a melancholy that could perhaps be called loneliness, but which was perhaps just a glimpse of what anyone's life really is: a journey from the attachment of the umbilical cord to a death where we are finally separated from everything and everyone. A brief glimpse at the moment of awakening before all our defence mechanisms and comforting illusions slot into place again and we can face life in all its unreal glory. Then — Jo Nesbo

Oppression often turns out to be the expectations we impose on ourselves and the expectations we interpret those around us as having. — Jo Nesbo

He saw beauty where no one could imagine it. And for that reason it was his alone. And he was its. — Jo Nesbo

A charming arsehole, isn't that what they're called? — Jo Nesbo

there were gods who needed to be worshipped and placated, and the currency for that was blood. — Jo Nesbo

Because we're the police,' Harry said. 'And not giggling concubines. — Jo Nesbo

A rat is neither good nor evil. It just does what a rat is suppose to do. From Phantom — Jo Nesbo

The great thing about facts is that you don't have to ponder whether they're desirable or not. — Jo Nesbo

Sometimes we're wrong when we think that we know the truth about our parents. — Jo Nesbo

Everyone knew that fat had become the new cancer, yet they bellyached about the dieting hysteria and applauded the "real" women's body. As though doing no exercise and being overfed was some kind of sensible mold. — Jo Nesbo

Everyone asks what the meaning of life is, but no one asks about the meaning of death. — Jo Nesbo

Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller. — Jo Nesbo

To have the chance of being loved we have to take a chance on being destroyed inside — Jo Nesbo

They say that life expectancy is higher for right-handed people than for left-handed. — Jo Nesbo

Harry had underrated intuition before, both other people's and his own, and it had been to his cost every time without exception. — Jo Nesbo

Because the thought that we weren't happy at least for some time during our lives is unbearable. Adults — Jo Nesbo

Harry lit up, drew the smoke deep into his lungs and tried to imagine the blood vessels in the wall of the lung greedily absorbing the nicotine. Life was becoming shorter and the thought that he would never stop smoking filled him with a strange satisfaction. — Jo Nesbo

I feel more related to some American crime writers than I do to Stieg Larsson. — Jo Nesbo

There was a gay man who lived nearby when I was growing up,' Harry recounted.
'He must have been forty or so, lived alone, and everyone in the neighbourhood knew he was gay. In the winter we threw snowballs at him, shouted "buttfucker" then ran like mad, convinced he would give us one up the backside if he caught us. But he never came after us, just pulled his hat further down over his ears and walked home. One day, suddenly, he moved. He never did anything to me, and I've always wondered why I hated him so much.'
'People are afraid of what they don't understand. And hate what they're afraid of. — Jo Nesbo

Life was becoming shorter and the thought that he would never stop smoking filled him with a strange satisfaction. Ignoring the warning on the cigarette packet might not be the most flamboyant act of rebellion a man could allow himself, but at least it was one he could afford. — Jo Nesbo

We have forensic psychiatrists who try to draw a line between those who are sick and those who are criminal, and they bend and twist the truth to make it fit into their world of theoretical models. — Jo Nesbo

Watched the close-cropped, long-legged policeman with the bad back stride quickly out of the canteen. — Jo Nesbo

Heredity. It's like going to a fortune-teller and regretting it. As human beings, we tend not to like things we can't avoid. Death, for instance. — Jo Nesbo

I'm thinking about how lucky I am," he said. "Because I have you. Because I have — Jo Nesbo

I'm just an entertainer. In a way crime stories are boring. A crime's been committed and at the end you know it will be solved. So you've got to make the story interesting besides it just being a plot. And that's why character matters, why you've got to make the characters interesting. — Jo Nesbo

Suddenly he realised why so many of the inmates went to the young man to talk. It was the silence. The beckoning vacuum of someone who simply listens without reaction or judgement. Who extracts your words and your secrets from you without doing anything at all. — Jo Nesbo

Revenge is a frequent motive in suicides, you know. They feel it is someone's fault their lives have been unsuccessful, and they want to inflict this guilt on others by committing suicide. — Jo Nesbo

you should never postpone your pleasures, that there was no guarantee that you would live another day. — Jo Nesbo

The fog was back. It seeped in through the streets, from the cracks around the closed windows behind the trees in the avenue, out of the blue door which opened after they had heard Weber's abrupt bark over the intercom, and out through the keyholes in the doors they passed on the way upstairs. — Jo Nesbo

There was a saying during the war: Those who decide late will always decide right. At Christmas in 1943 we could see that our front was moving backwards, but we had no real idea how bad it was. Anyway, no one could accuse Sindre of changing like a weather-vane. Unlike those at home who sat on their backsides during the war and suddenly rushed to join the Resistance in the last months. We used to call them the latter-day saints'. A few of them today swell the ranks of those who make public statements about the Norwegians' heroic efforts for the right side. — Jo Nesbo

Then two identical Cadillac Fleetwoods (special Secret Service cars flown in from the US) and the President sitting in one of them. Which one was kept secret. Or perhaps he was sitting in both, Harry thought. One for Jekyll and one for Hyde. — Jo Nesbo

The United States of America is more than just an ally,' Brandhaug began with an imperceptible smile. He said it with the same intonation that you use to explain to a non-Norwegian that Norway has a king and that the capital is Oslo. — Jo Nesbo

Beauty trumps everything. — Jo Nesbo

Yeah, but I guess sometimes it's easier to take responsibility for the dead instead of the living. The rest of us have to look after them, Harry. The living. After all, that's the responsibility that drives us. — Jo Nesbo

You sound like someone who thinks he has to fight the whole world," Joseph said. "But if you don't drop your guard now and then, your arms will be too weary to fight. — Jo Nesbo

We have this attitude that people become drug addicts against their will. That they couldn't possibly want this kind of life. But maybe that's not true. Maybe they don't want to live like other people - it just wouldn't suit them. — Jo Nesbo

Don't, he thought. Don't let it happen. Evil is not a thing. It cannot take possession of you. It's the opposite; it's a void, an absence of goodness. The only thing you can be frightened of here is yourself. Harry — Jo Nesbo

Otto would have sold his mother for a piece of my arse of course, but even at a young age I felt a strange attraction to girls and all those awful hetero things. — Jo Nesbo

The social space between people who don't know each other is form one to three and a half metres. - Beate Lonne — Jo Nesbo

My honesty now is merely a long-term investment in my own plausibility. Because there may come a day when I really need to lie, and then it might be handy if you think I'm honest. — Jo Nesbo

Love's the sum total of all the little things you can never really put your finger on. Love surrounds you like steam in the shower. You can't see the individual drops but you get warm. — Jo Nesbo

Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction. — Jo Nesbo

In a nutshell, Harry, they're two sides of the same coin. Life becomes a living hell, but the alternative is even worse. Ha — Jo Nesbo

Aristotle wrote that the human soul is purged by the fear and compassion that tragedy evokes. — Jo Nesbo

Of how it could have been. And reflecting on the fact that he had stopped thinking about how it could be. Perhaps this was what it was like getting old. He had lifted the cards he had been dealt, he had seen them. You didn't get new ones. So all that was left was to play the ones you had as well as you could. And dream about the cards you might have been given. — Jo Nesbo

With regard to power, women don't have the vanity men have. They don't need to make power visible, they only want the power to give them the other things they want. Security. Food. Enjoyment. Revenge. Peace. They are rational, power-seeking planners, who think beyond the battle, beyond the victory celebrations. And because they have an inborn capacity to see weakness in their victims, they know instinctively when and how to strike. And when to stop. You can't learn that ... — Jo Nesbo

Because they drive on the left in China, — Jo Nesbo

We're doomed to be do-gooders for the rest of our lives and doomed to fail. But, happily, truth is a relative business. — Jo Nesbo