"Completely Without Dignity": the Paris Review Interviews Karl Ove Knausgaard
Read an interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard and The Paris Review‘s Jesse Barron here.
Jesse Barron: Did the writing of Min Kamp give you what you were hoping for?
Knausgaard: I can’t speak for other writers, but I write to create something that is better than myself, I think that’s the deepest motivation, and it is so because I’m full of self-loathing and shame. Writing doesn’t make me a better person, nor a wiser and happier one, but the writing, the text, the novel, is a creation of something outside of the self, an object, kind of neutralized by the objectivity of literature and form; the temper, the voice, the style; all in it is carefully constructed and controlled. This is writing for me: a cold hand on a warm forehead.