What we humans think we know is nothing compared to what we need to believe to numb the fear and pain.

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

Thanks to the success of Henning Mankell and Peter Hoeg, there wasn't the same stigma attached to writing genre thrillers in Scandinavia as there was in many other cultures. Quite the opposite, in fact.

. We have this attitude that people become drug addicts against their will. That they couldn’t possibly want this kind of life. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe they don’t want to live like other people — it just wouldn’t suit them.

Good police officers are ugly.

Phantom' was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there's one voice from the past that's also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually.

They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.