Brief quotations on special subjects:

Criminal Justice

War, Militarism, Globalization

The Writer's Craft and Mission

February 2001
Other Norwegian writers are only world-famous in Norway, but Hamsun is so the world over.
        —Knut Hamsun's Centennial   (1958)

January 2001
The feel for the deeply useless, the tragic, the sublime must be consciously cultivated. If it is cultivated like a holy tree, then it will bear fruits later. And they will be fruits which are useful in a wholly different and far deeper and truer sense than shortsighted reasoning can be.
        —"Shall We Put Our Children into the Steiner School?"  (1952)

December 2000

Two thousand years.
And yet the natal night is here and now.
You are virgin, child and carpenter,
and shepherd, and a king from Eastern lands.
But know that Caesar, him you are as well!
King Herod too.
        —A Christmas Poem  (1953)

November 2000
It went straight to my heart when I read Warden Halvorsen's words about one of the prisoners in the District Prison: "What's been missing in his life is a loving home, for he never had one, poor fellow."
      One senses from the tone that the inmate has finally found a loving home in the prison. I myself know a lot of prisoners who have had to do without a loving home—it's practically the norm among prisoners not to have a loving home—, but I'm afraid that most of them don't understand that District Prison or the Penitentiary fully takes the place of what they missed in their childhood and youth. That's how ungrateful they are.
        —"Plank and Armchair"   (1960)

October 2000     (Bjørneboe would have been eighty on October 9)
The horoscope at the moment of my birth—in red October, between world wars and revolution—shows that Venus stood in Lepus, the Sign of the Hare, under Michael's Sword, which augured long journeys and that I would often sleep alone. At my birth the stars Astarte and Moloch stood in Aspis, the Serpent—which foretold revolutions and wars, bayonets and blood, burnt cities and fleeing mothers, as well as long trains of refugees who would fill the roads in many lands. The planets Shiva and Baal stood in Carnifex, the Headsman—presaging a time of slavery and prison, with millions in captivity, surrounded by endless barbed wire. The planets Uranus and Pluto entered into conjunction in Pardus, the Leopard, and slowly proceeded on their way—as agents of the heavy elements uranium and plutonium—through Lupus and into the constellation Arachne, where they brought to pass cities leveled to the ground and charred bodies by the hundreds of thousands.
        —Moment of Freedom   (1966)

September 2000
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

August 2000
A judicial system's first task will always be to secure and protect itself : the judicial system must necessarily regard itself as justice and the rule of law incarnate, and it thus becomes entirely logical that defense of the judicial system must have the very highest priority—followed by protection of the state and its officials and civil servants. The inevitable consequence will be that the judicial system and its administration will comprise the very skeleton of society, its innermost, immutable, reactionary mineral core. The circle is complete : the prosecuting authority can only be reported to the prosecuting authority, whereupon the prosecuting authority "denies" the accusations and declares the prosecuting authority free of any guilt.
      It cannot be otherwise.
          —The righteous and the innocent (1967)

July 2000

Boldly espouse each cause in season,
But always act with prudent reason.
Stride bravely forward in life's war
One hour before your time—no more!

         —Ten Commandments to a Young Man who Wants to Get Ahead (1963)

June 2000
To write the history of Peru is to write the history of colonialism; first come the soldiers, then come the priests, then come the ravens and the jackals. Then banks and business concerns are founded, for we shall inherit the earth in all its glory.
       Wherever you look you find the same faces, the same deeds, the same spirit. Through the fair kingdoms of earth we march to Paradise with singing. We have sanctified the injustice.
               —The Silence   (1973)

May 2000
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)

April 2000
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)

March 2000
I know very well who Satan is: He is freedom. He is the uncontrolled, the incalculable, the antithesis of order and discipline, the antithesis of the legalism of outer space.... We know where a planet will be in twelve years, four months and nine days. But we don't know where a butterfly will have flown one minute hence. Therefore the butterfly is of Satan.
               —Powderhouse    (1969)

February 2000
It's well known that madness doesn't always express itself in a lack of logic, but just as often in the fact that logic is all that remains of reason; counting and ordering is all that's left of the lunatic's consciousness. The meaninglessness screams, but the pedantry is perfect. Everything is made by a mad schoolmaster.
               —Powderhouse    (1969)

January 2000
The revolution must become continuous—eternal—it must be new every single day; the revolution must be permanent. Otherwise the society will degenerate and fossilize into centralism. It will no longer grow. But living transformation, development and growth are not possible unless we swallow the bitter pill which today is the despised and dysvalued intellectual freedom.
               —"Anarchism—today?"   (1971)

December 1999
Nothing is easier for someone with skill and a knowledge of anatomy than to kill a man without instruments, with just one chop of the hand, painlessly and instantaneously. But that isn't permitted anywhere; everything must happen ritually. All executions are ritual executions.
               —Powderhouse    (1969)

November 1999
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)

October 1999
Before God we are all Americans.
               —Powderhouse (1969)

September 1999
The human mind's road toward freedom has been a road through torture chambers, blood and fire. Nothing awakens such hate in secure, saved believers as skeptical, critical thought—as the desire to see for oneself, to test an inherited truth oneself before accepting it. For persons with this attitude "nothing is sacred"; no authority exists for them but the true authority which derives from greater insight, greater experience—from reality itself.
         —"Anarchism—today?"   (1971)

August 1999
Laughter means distance. Where laughter is absent, madness begins. The moment one takes the world with complete seriousness one is potentially insane. The whole art of learning to live means holding fast to laughter; without laughter the world is a torture chamber, a dark place where dark things will happen to us, a horror show filled with bloody deeds of violence.
        —Moment of Freedom   (1966)

July 1999
The sole thing you can do with your sorrow and with life's general incurability is to concentrate on the eternal joys: on food, wine, lovely weather, on the cool of the evening, on a folk song from the mountains, on greeting people cheerfully. The loveliest of all Italian greetings is only used when passing someone sitting on the steps or the sidewalk to enjoy the cool of the evening. It goes: "Buon fresco!"—that is, "Good cooling!" and you might say it's the sum of all wisdom about what good you can wish a fellow human being on earth. You shouldn't demand too much!
        —Winter in Bellapalma   (1958)

June 1999
Culture can only be produced, it can only be created—not conserved, not saved or rescued. Culture arises without our really being aware of it; in the deepest sense culture is innocent and unconscious. When an Egyptian potter turned a pot on the wheel, he didn't sit there thinking that now he was producing Egyptian Culture—he was working for a living. That what he made was also lovely, is due to his professional skill—but also to something extra which came of itself, like love. That can't be rescued either, when it ends. It comes and goes of itself. Neither culture nor love can be saved, not even by the police.
        —"The Traitor" (1961)

May 1999
PICCOLINO: During the war between France and Germany the Germans occupied France. When winter came around the Germans needed fuel. The French government had fled the country and sought refuge abroad. In order to get wood the Germans issued a decree requiring French farmers to turn over their wood to the Germans. Sabotage would be punished by death. On its side the French government decreed that all those who did not sabotage the Germans would be punished by death. According to international law both governments were right. Who was wrong?
       The civilian population, of course. The French people were guilty no matter what. Either of sabotage or collaboration. Whatever they did they were to be punished by death! For both are punishable under international law. In time of war the civilian population is always wrong.
         — The Bird Lovers   (1966, tr. Timothy Schiff)

April 1999
Europe today has a long and painful history of illness, a history of preferring lies to truth, gold to human kindness, power to understanding. We've preferred the disease to the medicine. And we've exulted over our false, bloated, sick health, we've prayed to the Caesars and we've cried "give us Barabbas" for two thousand years. We've eaten with the murderers and scorned the victims. And we don't even have the excuse that we didn't know better. We've known of other possibilities all along, we've had an almost free choice between understanding and violence—and our choices stand there in the history of our own sickness like milestones: gallows, stakes, and crosses.
         —The Silence  (1973)

March 1999
What on earth would our beloved, stinking, beautiful Europe have become without our dope fiends, drunkards, homosexuals, consumptives, madmen, syphilitics, bed-wetters, criminals, and epileptics? Our whole culture was created by invalids, lunatics, and felons.
        —Moment of Freedom  (1966)

February 1999
They are absolutely not militarists, and if they were allowed to own everything in the world without fighting for it, they'd prefer it that way. They want. The world is my breakfast.
        —Moment of Freedom  (1966)

January 1999
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)

December 1998
The irrevocable will come. This time it will happen. But for the time being I hear only the silence. Only silence remains. Nothing happens. Everything just waits. For something which has never been before, and which no one knows what is. We have no idea what's going to happen -- we know only that it's coming. After the silence will come the great transformation.
        —The Silence  (1973)

November 1998
Most of the directors I've met know no more about literary dramaturgy than an oyster knows about skiing.
        — "On the Odin Theater's adaptation of The Bird-Lovers"

October 1998
“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)

September 1998
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)

August 1998
In the courtroom war is the father of everything.
         —Moment of Freedom  (1966)

July 1998
Take away the "immoral" criminal, and we'd be robbed of one of the lies we need in order to live: namely the belief that there is someone who is even more immoral than we are. We all need someone to despise and look down on as not having full value. This is another of our strong points of likeness with that same criminal: in prison there always develops a hierarchical type of society, where the safecracker and the gunman rank highest and the sexual offender lowest.
     The prison is a true copy of our own society.
         —"Crime as a Way of Life"  (1967)

June 1998
Far deeper, and far less visible, than the strong transitory influence from the current majority flows quite another stream: that of the true European cultural heritage: Christianity, Greece, lasting art, literature and thought. The propagandists of the day instinctively understand that everyone who is caught up in this true cultural stream is pulled outside their influence. It must become a major goal to make the coveted target —youth—deaf and blind to the eternal, the deep-seated; and to fill them as much as possible with the current topics of the day. The youth of today is more than ever before the object of a gigantic, conscious campaign of seduction. This campaign has as its goal to deprive youth of every cultural basis of comparison, every standard, and thereby every possibility of inner freedom.
         —"Youth and Society" (1956)

May 1998
The general notion is that childhood is a kind of prelude. It isn't "life." Life begins when you get a car. Life begins when you pay taxes. Life begins when you know what a promissory note is. Life begins when. . . in short, when we meet life's "realities". —This despite the fact that every single person knows that what little internal reality his own life has is something he carries with him from his childhood; the crumbs of reality within us have their origin in the springs which flowed back then, many marvelous years ago.
         —"Shall We Put Our Children into the Steiner School?" (1953)

April 1998
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?

March 1998
    Thousands and thousands have given their lives for freedom of human thought, for freedom of conscience, and for the freedom of future generations—this freedom which we treat so badly today.
    The bloodbaths aren't the main thing; the main thing is the heretic.
    What is it that gives a person such strength?
    Greater than the problem of evil is the problem of good.
        —Powderhouse (1969)