All I can say is that my ambition far exceeded my talent.
The nature of Scandinavians is that they don't talk so much, there will be these dark secrets, and most things are under-communicated.
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.
What is worse? Taking the life of a person who wants to live or taking death from a person who wants to die.
Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living.
Everything you do leaves traces, doesn't it. The life you've lived is written all over you, for those who can read.
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.
Send me out into another life. But get me back for supper.
After all, in both languages we were dealing in large measure not with English and French, but with Scots and Irish, Bretons and Normans. . . There could be no more eloquent illustration of the colonial mind-set than a bunch of Celts and Vikings in a distant northern territory insulting each other as les Anglais and the French as if they were the descendants of the people who had subjected and ruined them.
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.