I tell myself I write because I want to say something true and original about the nature of evil. That is very ambitious - to say something about the human condition that hasn't been written before. Probably I will never succeed but that is what I strive to do.

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.

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.

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.

There’s only one thing worse than not satisfying a desire. And that is not to feel any desire.

Everything you do leaves traces, doesn't it. The life you've lived is written all over you, for those who can read.

It was a sudden inspiration. But inspiration never came without a reason.