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My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn't a great crime reader to begin with.

Jo Nesbo

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Jo Nesbo
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 29
Association Football Player
Author
Economist
Journalist
Musician
Novelist
Screenwriter
Singer
Writer
Oslo
Norway
Read
Begin
Great
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Crime
Scandinavian
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Scandinavians
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Scandinavia
Started
Europeans
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Hardly
American
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More quotes by Jo Nesbo

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Harry looked at Bellman. He could not help but admire him. The way you admire a cockroach you flush down the toilet and it comes creeping back again and again and in the end it inherits the world.
Jo Nesbo
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For many years, it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months, travel the world, through coups d'etat, assassinations, famines, massacres and tsunamis, and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle.
Jo Nesbo
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Those golden minutes before you are completely awake, when your mind is just drifting, you have no censorship you are ready to develop any kind of idea. That's when I come up with the best and worst ideas. That is the privilege of being a writer - that you can stay in bed for an hour in the morning and it's work time.
Jo Nesbo
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I think I was righteous. I saw myself as the good guy in my own movie. I didn't get into many fights when I was younger, but when I did, they were righteous. I always thought I was defending something good. I fought for friends who couldn't fight for themselves. I was still being selfish and arrogant, but I was focused on what was fair and unfair.
Jo Nesbo
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We're capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.
Jo Nesbo
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Some artists see a gig as an audience worshipping them. I think it is about having a great time together. I have a part as the singer. An audience has a part. Playing a gig doesn't make me high on myself.
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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.
Jo Nesbo
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I was sleeping in a water bed for a couple of years, recommended by my doctor. I was never comfortable in that water bed. In the middle of the night you would hear something happening - water and bubbles. I would always think there was some intelligent life in the water bed.
Jo Nesbo
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Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before - to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.
Jo Nesbo
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Crime fiction is a genre for writing stories about people - about conflict, about guilt, about passion, about the human condition.
Jo Nesbo
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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.
Jo Nesbo
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They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.
Jo Nesbo
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Everything you do leaves traces, doesn't it. The life you've lived is written all over you, for those who can read.
Jo Nesbo
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. We have this attitude that people become drug addicts against their will. That they couldn’t possibly want this kind of life. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe they don’t want to live like other people — it just wouldn’t suit them.
Jo Nesbo
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Doubt is faith's shadow.
Jo Nesbo
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Sick is a relative concept. We're all sick. The question is, what degree of functionality do we have with respect to the rules society sets for desirable behavior? No actions are in themselves symptoms of sickness. You have to look at the context within which these actions are performed.
Jo Nesbo
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The only pressure I feel is to write good books. And to not replicate the previous book. Whether you have a thousand readers or a million readers it doesn't change the pressure. I never feel tempted to give the reader what I think the reader wants.
Jo Nesbo
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I don't think I'll ever feel as famous or as popular as I felt when I was a 17-year-old soccer player in Modle. Only about 20,000 people live there and 12,000 of them come to every game. Running onto the pitch each week was just the most fantastic feeling. Nothing can beat that.
Jo Nesbo
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Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.
Jo Nesbo
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The stock market to me was like a video game. When it went off, it was like turning the game off. It wasn't something I'd think about until I'd turn the machine on again.
Jo Nesbo