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.

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

My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn't a great crime reader to begin with.

When I was a teenager, my father went bust. He could have declared himself bankrupt, but he was an honourable man and he insisted on paying back all his debts. That almost ruined the family. I was aware that my mother and father couldn't control things anymore. I guess I was afraid that we would end up on the street.

Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before - to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.

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

For many years, it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months, travel the world, through coups d'etat, assassinations, famines, massacres and tsunamis, and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle.