Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes

I can see a scene in my head, and when I try to get it down in words on paper, the words are clunky; the scene is not coming across right. So frustrating. And there are days where it keeps flowing. Open the floodgates, and there it is. Pages and pages coming. Where the hell does this all come from? I don't know.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.

I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.

The longer I carry on, the more difficult writing seems to get.

When I go home, I'm not the DA. I talk to my son about his day, I talk to my daughter about her day. I'm a wife and a mother.

I'm not a fast writer at all. I come empty and wait upon the Lord. So it really is all a waiting process, a patient process.

I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having gone cold and dead because of a hiatus. Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you're not doing it.

I hear so many writers say - and these are writers that I trust completely - 'I just started hearing a voice', or, 'The characters came to life'. I am filled with loathing for my own characters when I hear that because they do nothing of the sort. Left to their own devices, they do nothing but drink coffee and complain about their lives.

My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn't write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing.

Once, I thought I had a novel, and it turned out it was only a short story. I wrote about 800 pages, but it ended up being a short story. And if it ever happens to me again, I Will Go Insane.

When I stopped performing for 16 years and lived in Michigan and was married and raising my children, I wrote about four or five books. I haven't published them. I just haven't gotten around to it for several reasons.

I think I need the demons in order to write, but the demons have gone. It bothers me a lot. I've tried and tried, but I just can't seem to find a melody.

When I can't write, it depresses me.

Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.

I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.

My last book, 'The Language of Flowers,' I wrote completely on naptime, when my little kids were asleep.

Some days, you will sit down, and you write tens of thousands of words. Others, you have to force yourself to write a single sentence.

I gave up writing children's books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from 'Punch': as I have always wanted to escape. In vain.

Sometimes, so much of the difficulty is the question of 'What am I going to write about?' because the world is so vast.

I haven't read a book in a very, very long time because, when I'm writing, I don't like to see other people's work. I don't want to see something great and not be able to use it, and I don't want to have any subconscious influences.

I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah.

I'm not a chef, and I'm not an expert at anything. I'm just a mom and a wife.

I wanted to get out of the pictures and stay home so that I could have children.

My stuff is observational, what people do with their lives from the angle of a man that can't pull it off. So if I talk about having a family, it would be through the medium of a man who is in no fit state to be given a child to look after.