Previous Quote

Karl Ove Knausgård Quotes

Next Quote
Image of the quote is loading... SaveSave Writing was a defeat, it was a humiliation, it was coming face-to-face with yourself and seeing you weren't good enough. - Quote by Karl Ove Knausgård

Writing was a defeat, it was a humiliation, it was coming face-to-face with yourself and seeing you weren’t good enough.

Karl Ove Knausgård
Copy LinkCopy Link
Copy QuoteCopy Quote
Copy ImageCopy Image
Download Image of QuoteDownload Image

About The Quote

Related Authors

More Quotes From Karl Ove Knausgård

Until I moved to Stockhold I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if it stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern in which every phenomenon I saw was capable of evoking a memory which unleashed small landslides of feeling in me, some with a known source, others without. The people I encountered came from towns I had been to, they knew other people I had met, it was a network, and it was a tight mesh. But when I moved to Stockholm this flaring up of memories became rarer and rarer, and one day it ceased altogether. That is, I could still remember; what happened was that the memories no longer stirred anything in me. No longing, no wish to return, nothing. Just the memory, and a barely perceptible hint of an aversion to anything that was connected with it.
Karl Ove Knausgård
Attributing to another author, "Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep.
Karl Ove Knausgård
You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the THERE itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?
Karl Ove Knausgård
For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.
Karl Ove Knausgård
Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul.
Karl Ove Knausgård
Actually there were only two forms of existence, I reflected: one that was tied to a place and one that wasn't. Both had always existed. Neither could be chosen.
Karl Ove Knausgård
Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatestof them all, because it is the only one that sins against life.
Karl Ove Knausgård
There is a sort of light surrounding Abel, something pure and strong radiates from him no matter where he is or what he's doing. Sometimes Cain thinks he possesses a soul without shadows. That's what people want to be close to. But if so, it's not like a child's, for a child's soul is delicate, its flickering flame needs no more than the opening of a door onto the world to blow it out. Nothing can destroy Abel's light. In his presence one never feels wicked, only foolish. That darkness which in solitude can seem so powerful, occasionally even intoxicating, seems risible in his company.
Karl Ove Knausgård
Report Quote Report Quote Report Quote Submit Quote Submit Quote Submit Quote