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All Quotes by author - Per Petterson
" 1989 was such a very, very important year in Europe. The wall fell, the Soviet Union was crumbling, and so many things happened - in 15 minutes, the world changed. "
Wall
World
Year
" A lot can change because you are embarrassed by something. "
You
Lot
Embarrassed
" At first I wanted to go to university, but I really didn't dare to. I was too self-conscious, being a working-class kid. It was really difficult. I was going to study history, but the professor asked me some questions I didn't understand, and I didn't dare to ask what they meant. I left university and went to work in the Post. "
Me
History
Questions
" I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence. "
American
Best
Book
" I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a bottomless well for an author like me. "
Love
Me
See
" I decided if I couldn't be a writer, my life would be miserable. I had this imaginary room of references to all the books I had read, a kind of bubble, in which I lived. "
Life
Miserable
My Life
" I do consider myself a Norwegian writer, or a Scandinavian writer, as my family tree reaches into both Denmark and Sweden. I don't think about it, of course, when I am writing. "
Family
I Am
Myself
" I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular. "
Literature
Think
I Am
" I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it. "
Me
Great
Childhood
" If you're a Norwegian writer, you are not visible in the world. The door of the English language is very hard to open for a Norwegian writer. "
Language
You
World
" I grew up in the city. Both my mother and father were factory workers, and I loved the life in the 'metro.' Everybody saw me as a very urban guy. And I was. "
Father
City
Loved
" I hate plots. "
Plots
Hate
" I'm a family-based person, even though we didn't exactly have a very happy family. I was never in any doubt that this was a centre of writing. "
Happy
Writing
Person
" In a household tragedy, you are very much aware of being alone. It is something that is possible to grasp, and that is why it hurts so much. Because you are alone. I know a little about this. "
Being Alone
Alone
You
" 'In the Wake' was a very bleak book. This relationship was not too good, the father and son. This time around, I wanted a father and a son who really loved each other, which would be visible on the first page and would still be there on the last page. "
Relationship
Father
Time
" I rely heavily on rhythm when I write. You should tap your foot when you read it, all the way through. "
Write
Rhythm
Through
" I was born in 1952, so obviously the sixties were important. That's when I came of age. It was also a revolutionary period, a complete break with the generation before us in terms of culture, literature, music, and in politics, of course. 1968 was an important year; I was 16, and the world became clear to me, visible, so to say. "
World
Age
Culture
" I worked in a bookstore in Oslo, importing the English-language books. "
Oslo
Books
Bookstore
" I write about families. That is who we are. "
Write
Who
I Write
" Living here where I live, on a farm way out in the countryside, in the woods, in fact, I have plenty of time to be alone, and I like it. I always have. I like my own company. And I am not the only one who feels this way; a high percentage of the Norwegian population feel as I do. "
Woods
Live
Time
" Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write. "
Write
Mean
Making
" Philosophically I am, or at least have been, a follower of Sartre. I am very interested in the choices we make, or don't make, in life-defining matters. That moment of 'angst' and its consequences can be such a cruel thing. "
I Am
Choices
Consequences
" Some critics said, 'Hey, why are you writing historical novels?' I say they're not historical, they're contemporary, because people walking around who lived through this, even a little bit, they carry it inside. The contemporary isn't just what you can see now. "
Say
Walking
You
" The important discovery I made very early is that my novels had to be written without any given plan or outline. I can't do it in any other way. But then they are dependent on the sentences, my intuition, and, as I have experienced many times, the subconscious. "
Discovery
Early
Important
" There is always this quarrel about what is preferable: the straight, naturalistic, epic storytelling or the modernistic, disjointed, slightly hermetic one. To me it does not matter, as long as it's good. I like both kinds. Although the common reader seems to prefer the first, which is to be expected, and who would blame her? "
Blame
Me
Good
" To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere. "
Good
Me
Only
" To say that a family is happy I think is to diminish it, taking out what is interesting. Growing up, I don't think my family was any happier or unhappier than anyone else's. My mother and father should have been divorced or never even married. On the other hand, I remember many moments of happiness. "
Happy
Mother
Happiness
" To tell you the truth, I don't edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that's the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape. "
Truth
You
Work
" When a translation is very good, it is fascinating to see how the book changes and yet stays the same. I think 'Out Stealing Horses' sounds more American for Americans than it does in Norway, and still, it is all there, everything that I wrote. It's amazing. "
Think
American
Good
" When my mother talked about her brother, there was this light in her eyes. I thought, 'This is the basis of a novel.' "
Eyes
Brother
Thought
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