Everything you do leaves traces, doesn't it. The life you've lived is written all over you, for those who can read.

All interesting heroes have an Achilles heel.

I've read that it's the smell some carnivores use to find their prey. Imagine the trembling victim trying to hide, but knowing that the smell of its own fear will kill it.

As a writer, you have to believe you're one of the best writers in the world. To sit down every day at the typewriter filled with self-doubt is not a good idea.

Doubt is faith's shadow.

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn't a great crime reader to begin with.

To have the chance of being loved we have to take a chance on being destroyed inside

Love is a greater mystery than death.

Love surrounds you like steam in the shower. You can't see the individual drops, but you get warm. And wet. And clean.

As I say, we Norwegians love our woolens, and you can buy some beautiful knitwear in Oslo. They might cost you a bit - but they will last.

Assumptions should never be the basis of any understanding.

How they loved each other, these three, how they had suffered for each another, and yet how much joy they clearly took from simply being in the same room.

I wouldn't consider myself a so-called 'celebrity.' Arrrgh, for the love of God!

I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.

There aren't many other labels who I can say are that successful, and can give me as much as 4AD gives me, and still have such a great roster.

I certainly think that the best book in the world would owe the most to a good index, and the worst book, if it had but a single good thought in it, might be kept alive by it.

Blessed is that man who knows his own distaff and has found his own spindle.

Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.

The First Amendment was designed to allow for disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right.

With poverty everything becomes frightful.