Everything for me, in a way, ends up in a paradox. Jon Fosse

Your writing is wiser, and it knows more than you as a person know. It’s bigger. It’s the gift of all great literature, I think. 

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To meet a literary voice that really talks to you, it’s rare. It’s like a new friendship. It doesn’t happen that often.

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To manage to write and to write well, that’s grace. And I think perhaps life in itself might be a kind of grace. I can completely understand people who decide to leave this life. It’s an awful place in many ways. You can also think of death as a grace. To be here all the time, it must be awful.

In this fallen world, to use that Christian phrase, life is a kind of gift and a kind of grace. But then it becomes all too paradoxical. Everything for me, in a way, ends up in a paradox. And sometimes I feel I’m so full of contradictions that I can hardly understand how I manage to stay together, to be one.

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Do you often think about death?

No. I think the closer you get, the older you get, the less you think about it.

I think it was Cicero who said that philosophy is a way of learning to die. And I think literature is also a way of learning to die. It’s as much about death as about life. I guess this has to do with the form of great literature, of art. Art is alive when you create it, and there’s a reader who can bring it to life again. But as an object it’s dead.*