Harry looked at Bellman. He could not help but admire him. The way you admire a cockroach you flush down the toilet and it comes creeping back again and again and in the end it inherits the world.

Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living.

When I finish a book, I'm so exhausted that I'm sort of letting myself think that this could be the end.

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

All interesting heroes have an Achilles heel.

We're prisioners of... things.Of who we are.

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.