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.

Listen, I am someone who had chosen to earn their daily bread killing other people. I’m inclined to give people a bit of leeway when it comes to their actions and decisions.

Ever since the ’70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.

A rat is neither good nor evil. It just does what a rat is suppose to do. From Phantom

I was a really bad taxi driver. I only collided twice but it was one time too much.

But perhaps that’s why we take snaps…to provide false evidence to underpin the false claim that we were happy. Because the thought that we weren’t happy at least for some time during our lives is...

For me, the best places to write are on planes, trains and at airports. Not hotel rooms but hotel lobbies. I’m really happy when I’m waiting for a plane and the message comes that it’s...

Some artists see a gig as an audience worshipping them. I think it is about having a great time together. I have a part as the singer. An audience has a part. Playing a gig...

What a country of lazy shits, with fucking hypocritical politicians claiming that people actually wanted to work if they could. Norwegians voted for the Socialist Party because it made it a human right to shirk...

My father grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., with my grandparents. In Norwegian my name is pronounced ‘Yoo’ but my father used to call me ‘Joe.’

Sick is a relative concept. We’re all sick. The question is, what degree of functionality do we have with respect to the rules society sets for desirable behavior? No actions are in themselves symptoms of...

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.

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

Are you dying?”Cato lit his cigarette. “It’s not acute, perhaps, but we’re all dying, Harry.

I have questioned myself about the brutality in the last few novels. Actually in ‘The Leopard,’ in hindsight, I feel I went a little bit too far with screaming blood. There are a couple of...

Thanks to the success of Henning Mankell and Peter Hoeg, there wasn’t the same stigma attached to writing genre thrillers in Scandinavia as there was in many other cultures. Quite the opposite, in fact.

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

With regard to power, women don’t have the vanity men have. They don’t need to make power visible, they only want the power to give them the other things they want. Security. Food. Enjoyment. Revenge....

Until the Eighties, Oslo was a rather boring town, but it’s changed a lot, and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown, I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the...

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.

Well, it is in fact possible to put things behind you, Rakel. The art of dealing with ghosts is to dare to look at them long and hard until you know that is what they...

In most sports, your brain and your body will cooperate… But in rock climbing, it is the other way around. Your brain doesn’t see the point in climbing upwards. Your brain will tell you to...

When I was a teenager, my father went bust. He could have declared himself bankrupt, but he was an honourable man and he insisted on paying back all his debts. That almost ruined the family....

I don’t think I’ll ever feel as famous or as popular as I felt when I was a 17-year-old soccer player in Modle. Only about 20,000 people live there and 12,000 of them come to...

Love’s the sum total of all the little things you can never really put your finger on. Love surrounds you like steam in the shower. You can’t see the individual drops but you get warm.