Karl Ove Knausgaard Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“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?”

“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 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.”

“Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.”

“The eye of God ends up inside, so that, in the end, you take care of judgment and punishment yourself.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”