Translators From Norway

"When I was a boy, I was not a believer at first, not yet, but then I changed my outlook and with it my writing also changed. When I start working, I start from scratch, I don't document or prepare myself by doing research, but I try to turn what I am doing into something else. For me, writing is listening and for me to find it interesting it must be a new experience every single time. It is my desire to createsomething that was not yet there."

"I wrote my first novel when I was 20, I am now 65, so I have been practising this exercise of creation for a very long time, but the exciting aspect of writing always remains the act itself. It is not re-reading the work, which counts, but the journey into the unknown.Suddenly I get the feeling that what I am writing is already ready somewhere, outside of me, and I am left only with the task of putting it on the page before it disappears. For an atheist such as I was, understanding this and trying to explain it meant admitting that there are invisible things. It was by acknowledging this reality that I began to believe in something I did not believe in: the existence of God."

"God is three in one, something that is impossible to explain. [...] For a while I attended Quakers: no sacraments, no formal dogma. There was a prayer room, furnished in the simplest way, and we sat there in a silent circle, seeking the inner light. What I call God and what is in each of us says something to each of us. These are extreme forms of mysticism and spirituality belonging to the Protestant root, but even starting from these positions one still ends up encountering the mystery of faith. A mystery that unites Quaker and Catholic religion, to which I have since converted."

"Don't you remember that it is not easy to guard against the sin to which love drags?"

"In her extensive work, an Iliad of the North, Sigrid Undset has resurrected in a new and visionary light the ideals which once guided our forefathers who built that community from which our Germanic culture derived. To an age in which it may be easier to acknowledge that the right to the greatest happiness is the duty of renunciation – to this age Sigrid Undset has shown the ideals of our forefathers: duty and faithfulness."