142 Quotes by Karl Ove Knausgård

  • Author Karl Ove Knausgård
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    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.

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  • Author Karl Ove Knausgård
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    I have a longing for fiction – to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.

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  • Author Karl Ove Knausgård
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    Shame tells you when you’ve gone too far. Then you try if it’s okay to go too far. And it might be so that shame was right. You can never, never know that.

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  • Author Karl Ove Knausgård
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    In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that’s why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there’s an element of disappearing to a place that’s not me. It’s “the selflessness of writing”. It seldom happens, but when it does it’s worth quite a lot.

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  • Author Karl Ove Knausgård
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    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.

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  • Author Karl Ove Knausgård
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    I try to write about small insignificant things. I try to find out if it’s possible to say anything about them. And I almost always do if I sit down and write about something. There is something in that thing that I can write about. It’s very much like a rehearsal. An exercise, in a way.

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  • Author Karl Ove Knausgård
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    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.

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  • Author Karl Ove Knausgård
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    I’m not interested in the words or the meaning of the words. I’m interested in disappearing in it completely, to not be aware of yourself at all. That’s the way music works for me. It’s purely emotional. It goes straight to the heart. There are no explanations. That’s just it.

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  • Author Karl Ove Knausgård
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    You don’t think when you play music, you just try to play and be in it. It is the same for me when the writing is going really well. It’s the same kind of feeling. I’m just in it. It’s not the words, it’s not the sentences, I’m not aware of it. Then it’s good.

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