Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes

A creative person has to be alive. He can't borrow from things he's done in the past. He can't let his method choose his subjects or his characters. They can't be warped to fit his style.

We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising.

I'm constantly trying to be as original as I can.

There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that's impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.

You can't ever create defensively. You just have to create the next thing that really speaks to you.

Everything that I've ever made in my life is from my instinct.

I'm so happy when someone does something original, and there's no focus group or planning committee. If the cinema doesn't get an injection of that once in a while, we're in trouble.

The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.

Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.

Creativity doesn't follow titles. It just comes from where it comes from.

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it.

I was always being creative. I could never have played a defensive role because I would have been forced to destroy the other player's creativity.

One must not imitate what one wants to create.

Creativity is something which proceeds from within, out of immeasurable and inexplicable depths, not from without, not from the world's necessity. The very desire to make the creative act understandable, to find a basis for it, is failure to comprehend it. To comprehend the creative act means to recognize that it is inexplicable and without foundation.

Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.

I just want to be able to be creative.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

When someone comes along and expresses him or herself as freely as they think, people flock to it. They enjoy it.

Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe.

The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. And I really believe that. And what I try to teach young people, or anybody in any creative field, is that every idea should seemingly be outrageous.

Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.

Then I decided to draw from and on my own imagination, and everything came out perfect.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.