The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing. - Karl Ove Knausgård

But can’t I sleep here while you’re working?’
‘You know I won’t be able to. I can’t even write with a cat in the room.’
‘You’ve never tried with me in the room. I may have a good effect.’
Even though I was angry I couldn’t bring myself to say no. I had no right to be because what I was implying was that the miserable manuscript I was writing was more important than her. At that moment it was, but I couldn’t say that.
‘OK,’ I said.

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing. Where this ideal has come from I have no idea, and as I now see it before me, in black and white, it almost seems perverse.