Prayers were held in Assembly Hall. We all perched in rows on wooden benches while teachers sat up on the platform in armchairs, facing us.
We make realities out of our dreams and dreams out of our realities. We are the dreamers of the dream.
The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman.
Pain was something we were expected to endure. But I doubt very much if you would be entirely happy today if a doctor threw a towel in your face and jumped on you with a knife.
I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself.
I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It’s not possible.
My father was a Norwegian who came from a small town near Oslo. He broke his arm at the elbow when he was 14, and they amputated it.
Nobody gets a nervous breakdown or a heart attack from selling kerosene to gentle country folk from the back of a tanker in Somerset.
The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.
All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed quite literally to wound other boys, and sometimes very severely.
Pear Drops were exciting because they had a dangerous taste. All of us were warned against eating them, and the result was that we ate them more than ever.
All Norwegian children learn to swim when they are very young because if you can’t swim it is difficult to find a place to bathe.
An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.
I go down to my little hut, where it’s tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.
Some children are spoiled and it is not their fault, it is their parents.
I understand what you’re saying, and your comments are valuable, but I’m gonna ignore your advice.
The secret of life’, he said, ‘is to become very very good at somethin’ that’s very very ’ard to do.
If the Good Lord intended for us to walk, he wouldn’t have invented rollar skates.
Perhaps it’s chasing me. But I don’t think it will ever catch me because I am moving fast.
Obscurity is never a virtue.