Some critics said, ‘Hey, why are you writing historical novels?’ I say they’re not historical, they’re contemporary, because people walking around who lived through this, even a little bit, they carry it inside. The contemporary isn’t just what you can see now. Per Petterson Read Quote
I decided if I couldn’t be a writer, my life would be miserable. I had this imaginary room of references to all the books I had read, a kind of bubble, in which I lived. Per Petterson Read Quote
Philosophically I am, or at least have been, a follower of Sartre. I am very interested in the choices we make, or don’t make, in life-defining matters. That moment of ‘angst’ and its consequences can be such a cruel thing. Per Petterson Read Quote
I come from a working-class family. They’re the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things – social, political, emotional – take place there. It’s a bottomless well for an author like me. Per Petterson Read Quote
I don’t know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it. Per Petterson Read Quote
To say that a family is happy I think is to diminish it, taking out what is interesting. Growing up, I don’t think my family was any happier or unhappier than anyone else’s. My mother and father should have been divorced or never even married. On the other hand, I remember many moments of happiness. Per Petterson Read Quote
I grew up in the city. Both my mother and father were factory workers, and I loved the life in the ‘metro.’ Everybody saw me as a very urban guy. And I was. Per Petterson Read Quote
I was born in 1952, so obviously the sixties were important. That’s when I came of age. It was also a revolutionary period, a complete break with the generation before us in terms of culture, literature, music, and in politics, of course. 1968 was an important year; I was 16, and the world became clear to me, visible, so to say. Per Petterson Read Quote
The important discovery I made very early is that my novels had to be written without any given plan or outline. I can’t do it in any other way. But then they are dependent on the sentences, my intuition, and, as I have experienced many times, the subconscious. Per Petterson Read Quote
To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere. Per Petterson Read Quote
