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.

I was a really bad taxi driver. I only collided twice but it was one time too much.

I feel more related to some American crime writers than I do to Stieg Larsson.

I'm just an entertainer. In a way crime stories are boring. A crime's been committed and at the end you know it will be solved. So you've got to make the story interesting besides it just being a plot. And that's why character matters, why you've got to make the characters interesting.

Everyone has a need to do penance. It's a basic need, like washing. It's about harmony, an absolutely essential inner balance. It's the balance we call morality.

I write something that I believe I've made up, and it's only when a friend later points it out to me that I realise I've been writing about myself again.

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.