Literary Birthday – 6 December – Karl Ove Knausgård

Nine Quotes

1. For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.
2. The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing. Where this ideal has come from I have no idea, and as I now see it before me, in black and white, it almost seems perverse.
3. Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?
4. I can’t speak for other writers, but I write to create something that is better than myself… Writing doesn’t make me a better person, nor a wiser and happier one, but the writing, the text, the novel, is a creation of something outside of the self, an object, kind of neutralised by the objectivity of literature and form; the temper, the voice, the style; all in it is carefully constructed and controlled. This is writing for me: a cold hand on a warm forehead.
5. There is only one thing children find harder to hold back than tears, and that is joy.
6. 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.
7. It’s one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It’s another to have it captured in writing.
8. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows.
9. All good writers have that in common, they do not know how to write.

Karl Ove Knausgård is a Norwegian author. He is known for six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karl_Ove_Knausg%C3%A5rd.jpg

Soppakanuuna, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 by Amanda Patterson