Karl Ove Knausgard quotes

Karl Ove Knausgård is a Norwegian author best known for his autobiographical series, "My Struggle." His intensely personal style and candid exploration of everyday life have earned both critical acclaim and controversy. He continues to be one of the most influential voices in contemporary literature. Here are 11 of his quotes:

I have a longing for fiction - to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.

Karl Ove Knausgard

As a person, I'm polite - I want to please.

Karl Ove Knausgard

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it.

Karl Ove Knausgard

And it's a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.

Karl Ove Knausgard

When I look back at that freedom of childhood, which is in a way infinite, and at all the joy and the intense happiness, now lost, I sometimes think that childhood is where the real meaning of life is located, and that we, adults, are its servants - that that's our purpose.

Karl Ove Knausgard

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.

Karl Ove Knausgard

For example, how great the difference was between our days. While my days were jam-packed with meaning, when each step opened a new opportunity, and when every opportunity filled me to the brim, in a way which now is actually incomprehensible, the meaning of his days was not concentrated in individual events but spread over such large areas that it was not possible to comprehend them in anything other than abstract terms.

Karl Ove Knausgard

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

Karl Ove Knausgard

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

Karl Ove Knausgard