26 Quotes by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The difficult thing for me is that I want basically to be a good man. That's what I want to be.

It's one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It's another to have it captured in writing.

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 memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.

Is literature more important than hurting people? You can't argue that. You can't say it. It's impossible.

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.

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.

Concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value.

My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn't write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing.