A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room.

Death Row is a lonely place. Silence echoes through the walls with as much force as a cannon being fired in the Grand Canyon.

You decide for yourself when it will hurt.

I worked in a bookstore in Oslo, importing the English-language books.

Living here where I live, on a farm way out in the countryside, in the woods, in fact, I have plenty of time to be alone, and I like it. I always have. I like my own company. And I am not the only one who feels this way; a high percentage of the Norwegian population feel as I do.

I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a bottomless well for an author like me.