Q & A …

… Knausgaard on Masculinity, Excrement, and Quitting ‹ Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

When I was studying in my twenties and I tried to write… but I couldn’t write. Then I had a discovery when I was 26 or 27 that something was—I don’t know why it happened—but something was happening in my writing all of a sudden. It was like a breakthrough I had. I was just diving into it and something else came out of it, something I hadn’t seen before. I realized this is writing. You pour yourself in and you see something you haven’t seen before. It’s not yourself; it’s something else and that’s a combination of you, and before you, literature. You can’t think when you are doing that. You can’t calculate it. You can’t make it. It has to happen. But back to your question: if you do that, if you write blindly, if you do that for 3,600 pages, it’s a lot of blind places you know? It’s a lot of patterns. I think I’m interested in identity. I’m interested in personal identity, national identity. But if I try to analyze that, nothing happens.