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

Good police officers are ugly.

As a writer, you have to believe you're one of the best writers in the world. To sit down every day at the typewriter filled with self-doubt is not a good idea.

Intuition is just the sum of all your experience. The way I see it, everything you’ve experienced, everything you know, you think you know and didn’t know you knew is there in your subconscious lying dormant, as it were. As a rule you don’t notice the sleeping creature, it’s just there, snoring and absorbing new things, right. But now and then it blinks, stretches and tells you, hey, I’ve seen this picture before. And tells you where in the picture things belong.

The myth about me as a footballer has grown: I am now the lost Maradona of Norway.

Crime fiction is a genre for writing stories about people - about conflict, about guilt, about passion, about the human condition.

The only pressure I feel is to write good books. And to not replicate the previous book. Whether you have a thousand readers or a million readers it doesn't change the pressure. I never feel tempted to give the reader what I think the reader wants.