Harry looked at Bellman. He could not help but admire him. The way you admire a cockroach you flush down the toilet and it comes creeping back again and again and in the end it inherits the world.

Each of us will have to make the choices that allow us to be the largest versions of ourselves.

The point is not to pay back kindness but to pass it on.

Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction.

When I finish a book, I'm so exhausted that I'm sort of letting myself think that this could be the end.

You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts, but as a screenwriter, you are a bit down the ladder.

What we humans think we know is nothing compared to what we need to believe to numb the fear and pain.

When you're an established name, you know that a children's book will have a pretty good chance of getting picked up. Like Madonna. It's not that I had this great idea. Actually, in my case, it was a great idea.

Everyone has a need to do penance. It's a basic need, like washing. It's about harmony, an absolutely essential inner balance. It's the balance we call morality.

Good police officers are ugly.

I think my heart is quite selfish. If I followed my heart, I would not be a good person. But I have moral principles. I have to sit down and reflect.

Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.

The myth about me as a footballer has grown: I am now the lost Maradona of Norway.

They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.

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.

Let me say here and now that faith has never done me any good, only doubt. So that is what has become my testament.

The nature of Scandinavians is that they don't talk so much, there will be these dark secrets, and most things are under-communicated.

Crime fiction is a genre for writing stories about people - about conflict, about guilt, about passion, about the human condition.

A moral person is someone who accepts the consequences of their own morality, not those of others.