Swedish Quotes

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

I know what kind of things I myself have been irritated by in detective stories. They are often about one or two persons, but they don't describe anything in the society outside.

I have been threatened occasionally. But that happens to everybody who is writing this kind of things. Threats will come without fail. It might happen to the most 'innocent' texts. If it gets too much we call the police.

Crime stories are, as you know, one of the most popular forms of entertainment that exist. If you then try to have something to say... that I have, of course.

The pace of Swedish crime fiction is slower - Stieg Larsson's the exception. And I think we use the environment more.

Swedish taxes are high, and we don't get as much as we used to for them. And our schools aren't so good.

Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English.

People in Sweden talk a lot about the weather - how much we hate it. But Finns get more depressed.

One of the things I'm really good at is procrastinating.

Northern Sweden holds a special kind of magic. It's cold, lonely, and the people are tough and silent, or so the stereotype says. This is Asa Larsson's home turf and I find as much joy in reading her closely observed descriptions of the environment, as in following her intriguing plots.

In Sweden, we've moved away from the notion that mothers have some magical, special bond with children.

If I can hit No. 1 on the 'New York Times' best-seller list, I'm thinking of having the entire list tattooed on my body somewhere. It would be fabulous.

I've always viewed myself as a brand. When I started 10 years ago, that was very controversial. 'Marketing' and 'PR' were dirty words for the literary world, but that has changed. Once the book is finished, I want as many people as possible to read it.

I don't feel the need to prove myself by writing the next generational novel.

I do listen to Abba. And a lot of '80s and '90s pop music.

Crime stories are our version of sitting round a camp fire and telling tales. We enjoy being scared under safe circumstances. That's why there's no tradition of crime writing in countries that have wars.

When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.

The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.

Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity.

Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.

Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one.

Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.

We have to still develop the Ikea group. We need many billions of Swiss francs to take on China or Russia.