I have questioned myself about the brutality in the last few novels. Actually in The Leopard, in hindsight, I feel I went a little bit too far with screaming blood. There are a couple of scenes that I regret and wish I had the chance to rewrite. Phantom has less blood.

Jo Nesbo

Categorized in : Blood Couple Regret

I've read that it's the smell some carnivores use to find their prey. Imagine the trembling victim trying to hide, but knowing that the smell of its own fear will kill it.

smell knowing fear

What is worse? Taking the life of a person who wants to live or taking death from a person who wants to die.

wanting-to-die persons want

Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living.

losing life-is reason

Everything you do leaves traces, doesn't it. The life you've lived is written all over you, for those who can read.

written over-you

As a writer, you have to believe you're one of the best writers in the world. To sit down every day at the typewriter filled with self-doubt is not a good idea.

typewriters self believe

Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller.

crime-novels names fiction

Do what boxers do, sway with the punches. Don't resist. If any of what happens at work gets to you, just let it. You won't be able to shut it out in the long term anyway. Take it bit by bit, release it like a dam, don't let it collect until the wall develops cracks.

cracks wall long

I have problems with a religion which says that faith in itself is enough for a ticket to heaven. In other words, that the ideal is your ability to manipulate your own common sense to accept something your intellect rejects. It's the same model of intellectual submission that dictatorships have used throughout time, the concept of a higher reasoning without any obligation to discharge the burden of proof.

burden-of-proof common-sense heaven

Love is a greater mystery than death. by Jo Nesbo

Love is a greater mystery than death.

mystery greater love-is

Doubt is faith's shadow. by Jo Nesbo

Doubt is faith's shadow.

shadow doubt

I'm not a big crime reader, but I'm reading Michael Connelly's 'The Reversal.' I'm going back to his novels. I'm also reading Keith Richards' 'Life.' I'm always fascinated by the transition from the innocent late '60s and early '70s and the youth culture becoming an industry.

keith reading culture

Love surrounds you like steam in the shower. You can't see the individual drops, but you get warm. And wet. And clean.

clean individual love

I'm just an entertainer. In a way crime stories are boring. A crime's been committed and at the end you know it will be solved. So you've got to make the story interesting besides it just being a plot. And that's why character matters, why you've got to make the characters interesting.

matter character interesting

Revenge is the thinking man's reflex, a complex blend of action and consistency no other animal species has so far succeeded in evolving. Evolutionary speaking, the practice of taking revenge has shown itself to the so effective that only the most vengeful of us have survived.

revenge animal men

Intuition is just the sum of all your experience. The way I see it, everything you’ve experienced, everything you know, you think you know and didn’t know you knew is there in your subconscious lying dormant, as it were. As a rule you don’t notice the sleeping creature, it’s just there, snoring and absorbing new things, right. But now and then it blinks, stretches and tells you, hey, I’ve seen this picture before. And tells you where in the picture things belong.

sleep lying thinking

There’s only one thing worse than not satisfying a desire. And th... by Jo Nesbo

There’s only one thing worse than not satisfying a desire. And that is not to feel any desire.

satisfying desire feels

To have the chance of being loved we have to take a chance on bei... by Jo Nesbo

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

take-a-chance destroyed chance

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

home art thinking

I tell myself I write because I want to say something true and original about the nature of evil. That is very ambitious - to say something about the human condition that hasn't been written before. Probably I will never succeed but that is what I strive to do.

ambitious evil writing

My father grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., with my grandparents. In Norwegian my name is pronounced 'Yoo' but my father used to call me 'Joe.'

grandparent names father