Of course there's only one thing which counts when it comes to books—and that is, whether they'rewritten on the island of Patmos, in other words whether they've come into being during an effusion of the Holy Spirit. Naturally not all books can be written during a spiritual outpouring, inasmuch as thousands of books are written outside of Patmos every year, and inasmuch as the Holy Spirit can't possibly have time to shed Grace on everything that's intended for print.
          —Moment of Freedom (1966)

           At this point I discovered with full clarity that all of the records I had written actually formed parts of a larger whole, and that they read and evaluated each by itself, volume by volume only show a meaningless and incoherent chaos. Only seen in conjunction did they have a meaning.
          —Moment of Freedom (1966)

           I would probably even set up this basic doctrine for record-keepers: Write so that every word can be used against you!
          — Powderhouse (1969)

          "Lectures&q uot;: a form which has arisen for the sole purpose of swathing all exactitude and precision in a veil of fog beyond all power of discernment and all criteria.
          —Powderhouse (1969)

           I utterly refuse to recognize a silence and a calm of spirit which is built on having given up the meeting with the world—I won't accept a peace of mind which consists in the mind's having withdrawn into itself and repudiated Babylon.
          —The Silence (1973)

           To dissect Europe is to cut up oneself, because it's one's own thoughts and instincts and passions one meets in the stinking, cancerous intestines one finds inside the freak, inside the monstrosity. This stinking mixture of blood and sickness is my own interior. But I shall continue to cut myself up, continue to dig around in inflammation, pus, and purulence—until we've seen all the entrails of this pretty picture. Until we see where the rabies has led us. Love of others' gold, indifference to others' blood—these are the chief symptoms.
          It's just a matter of following the trail of blood.
          —The Silence (1973)

          "And while we sit here waiting for the battle to begin," said one of the men to the king, "let me propose that we ask someone to tell a story—one which can pass the time without awakening heavy thoughts."
          —Epigraph to Winter in Bellapalma (1958)

           The spoiled, abused, dishonored, ravished, inflated, murdered and humiliated words must be awakened from the dead. I could imagine someone writing a great novel, a great drama, many, many poems—to make one or two words have a meaning again. In getting words to mean something lies the writer's whole art, aesthetics, technique: to get words to bear witness.
          —Writing and Criticism—Fight or Flight? (undated)

           It's especially malicious and destructive to take a stand vis-à-vis the world if one is a writer. If what one writes has anything to do with contemporary reality, then it isn't only an attack on democracy and American family life, but it isn't delicate—no, it's even worse: it isn't art. . . .
          Proper writers should write about how dull it is in marriage, how painful and hard it is to be young, how sad it is to be frustrated, how lonely it is to be lonely, how terribly boring it is not to have any interests, and above all how cruelly difficult, lonely and alienating it is to live in a welfare state. One should further write about nights of love, or the reverse, that one can't make it. That is pure writing, that is central poesy, that's . . .yes, that is art.
          —Writing and Criticism—Fight or Flight?

           Of course one can judge books from many different points of view, or "criteria" if you will. You can evaluate books as, e.g., weapons for throwing. It goes without saying that thick and heavy books with solid bindings are best. . . . If you want to go all the way, you can also evaluate literature by the same standard one uses to judge editions of the Bible when one is in prison: the degree to which the paper is suited for rolling cigarettes. That is an impartial and objective standard. I myself have smoked several pages of the Acts of the Apostles. The oldest editions are best, for they have the thinnest paper.
          —"On Helge Krog's 'political unconsciousness'" (1970)

           To evaluate a book's literary quality is so difficult because, among other things, we actually have no hard and fast criteria whatsoever. Year of publication, weight, morals, paper quality and Leninism are relatively measurable qualities, but a book's literary worth is not. It is wholly unmeasurable, and this is the reason for literary history's enormous multitude of critical labels.
          —"On Helge Krog's 'political unconsciousness'" (1970)

           A part of the truth which is accessible to us today is that we live in a world which is characterized not by problems, but by dilemmas—of problems which can't be solved. If literature brings solutions, if it brings answers, then it lies. With its reality-content it can only contribute to posing the questions more sharply and clearly and drastically than before.
          —Literature and Reality (1971)

           The province of literature is neither the interior nor the exterior; its task is to explore the meeting between the two. Literary activity lies in describing the meeting between external reality and a human mind. The world around us mirrored in a human consciousness.
          —Literature and Reality (1971)

           Just as many capitalist publishers expect instant economic profit, the political commissars expect instant political profit.
          But this is in total opposition to literature's true nature: namely, for its effect to be a long-range one. Since it has a much greater dimension of depth than a bestseller or a political pamphlet, it is predestined to take effect more slowly, but all the more powerfully. In contrast to the pamphlet and to journalism, literature works from below and from within. But we are all inclined to calculate superficially and shortsightedly.
          —Literature and Reality (1971)

           In reality it's just as idiotic to demand that literature shall be "unpolitical" as that it shall be "political." Inasmuch as the whole concept "politics" can be defined as an attempt to find a way of living together on earth, everything we write will willy-nilly be political, but at the same time the word "political" ceases to mean anything at all. All genuine philosophy is occupied with the same problem: living together on earth, "making the earth habitable," as Brecht says. One could say: "politics" means finding a way in which one can stand to live with other people, or reaching an agreement about sharing the earth's riches in a reasonable way, in brotherhood, in freedom and equality.
          —Literature and Reality (1971)

           Books—certain books—have a strange ability to go underground, to disappear, become invisible, and to grow during the interval in which they're wholly or partially forgotten. Their effect will come slowly, their force grows as during a long and secret process of fermentation. A book which disappeared in silence and oblivion the day after it was published can return—make its comeback—twenty, fifty or a hundred years later, with a power and a youthfulness, a freshness and a vitality which is overwhelming, and which can set its mark on the thought of decades.
          The reason for this resides in the fact that true literature has a far greater degree of reality-content than the current pamphlet or reportage can have. Such works are born with difficultly and grow slowly. A leopard has a longer gestation period and slower growth than a domestic cat. And a lion needs more time than a leopard.
          —Literature and Reality (1971)

           For critics it's an easy task to point out that the author is always contradicting himself. The natural response would be: "Who else should I take the time to contradict?"
          —Preface to Aske, Vind og Jord (1968)

           Realism is not imitation, but a selection of those things which are lasting.
          —Foreword to Semmelweis

           Literature must have a religious dimension if it is really to be literature at all. An unmetaphysical poem is artistically speaking an unrealistic poem; it is false if it conveys nothing of life's macabre double bottom, of all things' ambiguity. If a writer is not clear that our whole crumb of a human life is one long wandering on thin ice over coal-black water, then everything he writes is boring. It is insignificant.
          —"Arnulf Øverland at 70" (1959)

           I have never written tendentious novels! I have written about the individual human being and his right to have his own chidlhood, his own love and his own death. Whether it is the school system, the state, the political or the judicial system which assaults the individual is beside the point. Those are just circumstances, the backdrop of the times.
          —Interview in Aftenposten (1959)

           I've been writing for eight years, and it is only now that I'm beginning to discover what I've actually let myself in for. It's incomprehensible that anyone engages in something which is so utterly impossible. Every word, every comma, every sentence is a problem. Nothing writes itself any more, every page I produce I regard with the very deepest suspicion.
          —Interview in Aftenposten (1959)

           After all, writers are autodidacts. They have to teach themselves everything, while musicians, painters, actors and sculptors acquire their foundations at schools and academies. And it takes a long time to teach oneself to write. It really is not a professsion for a Wunderkind, even if it often looks that way. Where the innate talent ends, the real art begins.
          —Interview in Aftenposten (1959)

           I don't think you get closer to the truth about love through naturalism. To take a parallel from painting: If in an ordinary painted nude you draw in certain organs with a very fine brush and true to nature in every detail, then you just succeed in destroying the wholeness of the picture, you fix the viewer's attention on a detail which ought to be seen in a painterly fashion, not a biological one! You tear the totality to pieces, you draw attention away from what you really wanted to say. It isn't a moral objection I want to make here, but an artistic one.
          —Interview in Aftenposten (1959)

           One learns everything from children. Learns to see truly. We are trained to see fixed frames, and what is outside these frames we don't see. I think the hardest and most harrowing thing an adult can do is to look at the world with the eyes of a child. To see the truth. It is a writer's task—mine—to use other frames and other dimensions to look at events and history in. It often results in your coming to wander in the mind's borderland, especially to get hold of the lies in yourself and in the world. It was a child who looked and said that the emperor had no clothes on—and he wasn't wearing a stitch.
          —Interview in Impuls (1967)

          Q.    Can writing become an escape from life? Is writing a narcotic?
          A.    No. Writing is itself the reality. It is through writing that you come to clarity about the time you live in, its problems. It is through writing that you take the reality all the way into yourself and live into it. Writing is not an escape. Not for me.
          —Interview in Bindestreken (1970)

Top   |   Home   |   Theme Index   |   Site Map

This page added April 2001