I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.

Shame tells you when you've gone too far. Then you try if it's okay to go too far. And it might be so that shame was right. You can never, never know that.

As a person, I'm polite - I want to please.

Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.

The way we deny death says something about how we live our lives, doesn't it? At least in Sweden or Scandinavia, you don't have to search further back in time than maybe three generations to find another way to relate to death. People then had a different, closer relationship with death; at least it was like that in the countryside.

In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot.

We live in the best of worlds. But still, it's like we've lost something on the way to here: a sense of life. I can't know for sure, I might be the only one who's lost it. Maybe everybody else is living the now, thinking they're having it well. Anyhow, that motivated me to write the books.