Icelandic Literature Quotes

In Iceland, book lives matter in every sense of that phrase: The shelf-life of the book, the lives in the book, the life of the writer, and the life of the reader.

For us Icelanders, the Sagas are like the Bible, only much better.

So much Western storytelling comes from Scandinavia. I've read that in the past, storytellers would travel to Iceland and exchange stories. It's kind of the birthplace of great storytelling.

Thanks to the Jolabokaflod, books still matter in Iceland; they get read and talked about. Excitement fills the air. Every reading is crowded; every print run is sold.

I'm Icelandic. We're all so dramatic.

I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing 'Burial Rites,' I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.

About two hundred or two hundred and fifty years after the death of Grettir, his history was committed to writing, and then it became fixed - nothing further was added to it, and we have his story after having travelled down over two hundred years as a tradition.

I defy anyone to finish Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' without wetting the pages with tears.

Being a writer in Iceland, you get rewarded all the time: People really do read our books, and they have opinions; they love them, or they hate them. At the average Christmas party, people push politics and the Kardashians aside and discuss literature.