I sat down on the sofa, strangely restless, it was as though the tempo inside me was greater than that outside. - Karl Ove Knausgård

I am alive, I have my own children and with them I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father.

They aren’t. I know that.

When I enter a room, they don’t cringe, they don't look down at the floor, they don’t dart off as soon as they glimpse an opportunity, no, if they look at me, it is not a look of indifference, and if there is anyone I am happy to be ignored by it is them. If there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it is them. And should they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them and take a bow and accept the bouquets.

I was a wannabe who was actually unable to write because I had nothing to say, who wasn’t honest enough with himself to draw the appropriate conclusions and was therefore trying to get a foot in the world of literature at any cost. Not as someone who created something himself, someone who wrote and was published, but as a parasite, as someone who wrote as others wrote, a second-rater.

Time is distance, and when it is suspended, we are no longer in the world but a part of the world. That is what the music of Orpheus did to the women who in a kind of collective trance or ecstasy tore his head off and tossed it into the sea, where it drifted slowly away, still singing.