Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes

I like the idea of imagining a sound and feeling a sound and then having it come out through your body, through an instrument. That's an important way to make music.

I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.

I never have used any other artist as a model for a sound or a song. It always has to come from an emotion, and capturing the essence of that emotion in a song.

Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.

When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.

Each time I play a song it seems more real.

I never sit and fill a journal with lyrics. Most of the time I'm trying to write a feeling, not a story. I'm not necessarily trying to describe the details of a place or event so much as the feeling of the thing. It is a kind of weird alchemy that is elusive until it feels right.

I sometimes wish I had never had to sell a painting. Every painting you make represents the time it was made and how you were feeling and what your influences were... You are never going to feel that way again, so you can never repeat it.

In many ways my paintings are about energy — both in how they are created and the image itself.

Once we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an activity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is sincere will tell you) to moderate feelings to fit the form. The artist's feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling.

I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances in the back of my mind.

It depends on the story and the filmmaker. And it depends on the character, and the heart and soul of the person that I see on the page, and if it resonates with something that I think I can summon in myself.

What I found was an emotional consistency with him. The words, the scenes, the situations - I wasn't mimicking what I thought Branch Rickey's emotional reality would have been.

Most of the really good songs are dead true. ... It had to have happened to have the song be there. Every time I've tried to make stuff up it just kind of falls flat. So the majority of my work is something that happened to me, I saw happen to someone else, or a friend of mine told me happened. There is a certain amount of theatrical and poetic license. People are supposed to like it, that's why you're doing it. It's supposed to be fun. It's not brain surgery, it's heart surgery. They're just songs.

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

I devour nature ceaselessly. I exaggerate, sometimes I make changes in the subject; but still I don't invent the whole picture. On the contrary, I find it already there. It's a question of picking out what one wants from nature.

When you go into a starring position and you're carrying a movie, it's important that people like it. So I only do things that I can connect with in some sort of way, or that I can identify with.

The songs that I sing and the songs that I write have always just been what I feel my voice does well, and what my inspirations have been and a kind of culmination of everything.

For example, if it's a sad scene, I need to feel that way, at least to a slight degree and for a short while, to get it right. Which is why I sometimes listen to music when I'm revising. Music creates moods for me quicker than any other medium.

My life is really a history of observing forms and taking in imagery. I don't mean in a photographic way, I mean in a way of feeling them structurally.

When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

It is not so much the content of what one says as the way in which one says it. However important the thing you say, what's the good of it if not heard or, being heard, not felt?

Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share. You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

The painter doesn't try to reproduce the scene before him... he simplifies and eliminates until he knows exactly what stirred him, sets this down in color and line as simply and as powerfully as possible and so translates his impression into an aesthetic emotion.

A sketch will not serve more than one state of mind & will not serve to drink at again & again — in a sketch there is nothing but the one state of mind — that which you were in at the time.