All interesting heroes have an Achilles' heel.

I wasn’t that into crime novels at all, but a friend introduced me to the work of Jim Thompson – I loved all his books.

Everyone has a need to do penance. It’s a basic need, like washing. It’s about harmony, an absolutely essential inner balance. It’s the balance we call morality.

What do we mean by ‘crazy?’ What do we mean by ‘mad?’ At what point is a person just different and at what point can we call it a disease and say that they are not responsible for their actions? Or are we all slaves to the chemical processes that go on in our brains?

My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn’t a great crime reader to begin with.

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.

I’m afraid I didn’t really like Caracas in Venezuela. From what I saw it seemed so crime-ridden that you really have to be on your guard all the time.

Christian ethics demand that you should not take revenge. The paradox is, naturally, that Christians worship a God who is the greatest avenger of them all. Defy him and you burn in eternal hell, an act of revenge which is completely out of proportion to the crime.

Thanks to the success of Henning Mankell and Peter Hoeg, there wasn’t the same stigma attached to writing genre thrillers in Scandinavia as there was in many other cultures. Quite the opposite, in fact.

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.