Writing isn't black magic. You just have to come up with an idea...

Writing was a defeat, it was a humiliation, it was coming face-to-face with yourself and seeing you weren't good enough.

For a writer it was perhaps most important not to write, but to read. Read as much as you can because in so doing you won't lose yourselves, become unoriginal, what happens is the opposite, by doing this you'll find yourselves. The more you read, the better.

You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the THERE itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

Attributing to another author, "Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep.

If you are disappearing from yourself, but you're still writing, then there is a kind of activity of thinking going on, which in my world is similar to what's going on in music.

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.

The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.

National identity is a motion. It's something you're inside, you don't get what's happening, you can't see it from above. And that's where you have to write. You can't see what's happening now or what's going to happen, so you just dive into it and write.