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 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.

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

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.

To have the chance of being loved we have to take a chance on being destroyed inside

Just imagine walking away from something you've started. Something you really believed would be good. I don't think I could ever do that.

Let me say here and now that faith has never done me any good, only doubt. So that is what has become my testament.