Dag Solstad Quotes

He couldn't imagine using the word 'rewarding' about a work of art - for instance that such and such a book has given me so much, taught me so much, etc etc. - but thought solely that it enlightened him, made him see, cynically and withough false expectations, so that he felt he was alive.

Han stirret på den store blonde piken. Fitte! ropte han. Spis maten din! Flesketryne!

for a brief moment it is his fate, and nothing else, that is frozen into immobility on the stage. The moment of the minor figure. Both before and after this he remains the same, the man who reels off those smart lines, one of which has acquired an immortal status in Norwegian literature: ‘If you take the life-lie away from an average person, you take away his happiness as well.

And so, when the chips are down, I must say, though not without a sense of repugnance, that if you wish to show your belief in democracy, you also have to do so when you are in the minority, convinced both intellectually and, not least, in your innermost self, that the majority, in the name of democracy, is crushing everything you stand for and that means something to you, indeed, all that gives you the strength to endure, well, that gives a kind of meaning to your life, something that transcends your own fortuitous lot, one might say. When the heralds of democracy roar, triumphantly bawling out their vulgar victories day after day so that it really makes you suffer, as in my own case, you still have to accept it; I will not let anything else be said about me, he thought.

Tidene forandrer seg, alt forandrer seg, bare ikke Notodden, for den er Norsk Hydros misforståelse. Norsk Hydro har flyttet sin hovedproduksjon til Herøya, sitt hovedkontor til Oslo, er store ute i verden, og produserer gass på Karmøy og kraft i Glomfjord, og så å si intet på Rjukan, men Rjukan er ingen misforståelse, den er en del av den verden som forandrer seg. Rjukan har hatt sin storhetstid, Notodden kun sin store misforståelse. Men vi forlater aldri Notodden, vi tviholder på vår misforståelse. Vi nedlegger alt her, men ikke uten å sette inn noe i stedet. Det er min oppgave. Opp gjennom årene har vi hatt vår største misforståelse i tankene, og aldri forlatt den.

He wanted his birthday to disappear, dissolve in water and sink to the bottom. A day like all the others. That's how he felt about it, wanting to maneuver that day into silence, and outside of time, time lived and gone for good, so that eventually not even a scratch on his skin would remind him of the day when it occurred, or of that time; that's what gave Singer a great sense of satisfaction. Then he felt that he was once again in sync with himself and could breathe a sigh of relief while, without thinking about it, he endured yet another day in his life without noting that forty-seven years had now passed since his birth. Such is Singer's life, it proceeded without any need to mark its passage, thought Singer, moving with his own unique rhythm, yet not totally without self-awareness, in spite of everything. To be yanked out of the automechanism of life in order to celebrate his birthday as a boisterous reminder was something that broke with what Singer regarded as his essential nature.

[...] og at han la særlig vekt på å gjennomgå Ibsens dramaer med sine elever, da var det den andre kunne si: Ja, Ibsen, ja, han ligger nok for høyt for meg, eller: Nei, du vet, jeg har aldri kommet til å interessere meg for litteratur, og i dette lå det en beklagelse, og den var ikke deres egen, for de var jo så lite interessert i litteratur og Ibsens dramaer at de ikke så noen grunn til å beklage det, hva i himmelens navn var det de skulle beklage, for sin egen del? Nei, det var som samfunnsmennesker de fant det nødvendig å uttrykk denne beklagelse, altså beklagelse som et nødvendig uttrykk for den dannelse ethvert sivilisert samfunn søker å gi sine borgere, og som det, som man ser, i dette tilfellet hadde lykkes med. At enkle samtaler mellom gamle kjente som tilfeldigvis treffes etter noen år, arter seg slik, og ikke på stikk motsatt vis, på dette bygger et hvert sivilisert samfunn sine fundamenter, hadde han ofte tenkt, ikke minst i de siste åra.

By the way, in every novel there is a big black hole, which is universal in its blackness, and now this novel has reached that point. Surrounded by spirited young ladies, with all their sweetness, we find ourselves together with Singer in a novel that is like a big black hole. Why is Singer the main character in this novel? And not only the main character but the one around whom everything revolves? Fortunately, the other characters in this novel are completely unaffected by the fact that they are characters, or ideas, that exist only in that they revolve around this main character. I wish I could have said something that Singer wouldn't be able to ponder. There's something I would have said about precisely this point, but I have no words for it. My language ceases when Singer's pondering ceases. Yet that does not make us identical.

He couldn't manage to tear himself loose in order to "Look at her!" as she wanted. At the library he checked in books and checked out others as he stamped them. He cataloged new books, inspected old ones, and took a keen interest in the new computer system, in which everything was to be entered, and which heralded a new era and completely new routines. But he could not "Look at her!" Why not? Because he regarded it as an impossible demand and assumed she knew this. When she shouted like that, she was shouting for an obligatory action on his part, and when he therefore turned toward her, she knew that she was seeing a Singer who was looking at her in an obligatory way and that is noninvasive amiability was a plea to be understood in a different manner. But if she didn't want to understand and be understood, in this different manner, there was little he could do, and that too she knew, or so he assumed, in a glass like way, which combined with other glass-like ways of relating to life, in this distant attitude of his, which was his way of living and withstanding that which he, perhaps all alone in the world, experienced as unbearable.

How the poor masses were streaming into the big city, bewitched by the idea of living just there. They left a poor, humdrum everyday life in the countryside for a hopeless slum on the fringes of the metropolis from which they would never escape.

The advertising images say more about our time than the art you find in the galleries.

Dette er livet, og du kan ikke gi slipp på det, du klynger deg til et håp om at et mirakel skal skje, og hver kveld skjer det noe helt motsatt.

He was zealous in his efforts to understand avant-garde art, that form of art which has really taken hold of our own day and age. He often felt that he had failed to understand it, indeed, more often than he would admit, it left him in a state of incomprehension, confusion, indifference, even after he had used all his astuteness to understand only a snippet of it. It could make him feel desperate. He felt a failure because he didn’t understand the art of his own period, and it can’t be denied that in such situations he often pretended to understand more than he actually understood, and even feigned an admiration for works of art which, in actual fact, left him unmoved.

For a long time I took a purely theological standpoint on the issue, which is actually so fundamental that it can be used as a springboard for any debate – if environment is the operative factor, for example, if man at the outset is both equal and shapeable and the good man can be shaped by engineering his surroundings, hence my parents’ generation’s belief in the state, the education system and politics, hence their desire to reject everything that had been and hence their new truth, which is not found within man’s inner being, in his detached uniqueness, but on the contrary in areas external to his intrinsic self, in the universal and collective, perhaps expressed in its clearest form by Dag Solstad, who has always been the chronicler of his age, in a text from 1969 containing his famous statement “We won’t give the coffee pot wings”: out with spirituality, out with feeling, in with the new materialism, but it never struck them that the same attitude could lie behind the demolition of old parts of town to make way for roads and parking lots, which naturally the intellectual Left opposed, and perhaps it has not been possible to be aware of this until now when the link between the idea of equality and capitalism, the welfare state and liberalism, Marxist materialism and the consumer society is obvious because the biggest equality creator of all is money, it levels all differences, and if your character and your fate are entities that can be shaped, money is the most natural shaper, and this gives rise to the fascinating phenomena whereby crowds of people assert their individuality and originality by shopping in an identical way while those who ushered all this in with their affirmation of equality, their emphasis on material values and belief in change, are now inveighing against their own handiwork, which they believed the enemy created, but like all simple reasoning this is not wholly true either, life is not a mathematical quantity, it has no theory, only practice, and though it is tempting to understand a generation’s radical rethink of society as being based on its view of the relationship between heredity and environment, this temptation is literary and consists more in the pleasure of speculating, that is, of weaving one’s thoughts through the most disparate areas of human activity, than in the pleasure of proclaiming the truth.

Bir insanın elinden hayatı boyunca kendisini kandırdığı şeyi aldığınız anda mutluluğunu da bitirirsiniz.

Yoksul kitlelerin nasıl da başkentte yaşamanın cazibesine kapılıp oraya akın ettiklerini gözleriyle görmüştü. Yoksul ve renksiz günleri köylerinde bırakarak metropolün kenarına ilişmiş umarsız bir gecekondu dünyasına göç ediyor ve ömür boyu da oradan ayrılmıyorlardı. Geldikleri yerde daha iyi bir hayatları vardı ama yine de metropollere göçüyor ve dişleriyle tırnaklarıyla orada tutunmaya çalışıyorlardı. Neden? Çünkü isanlar cazibeye kapılıyorlardı. Büyük arabaların, televizyon programlarının, lüks lokantaların, trafik keşmekeşinin, sinemaların reklam ışıklarının, piyango çekilişlerinin, duvarların arkasında kapılarında silahlı güvenlikçilerin beklediği villaların ve bütün bunlarla aynı çağda yaşamanın dayanılmaz cazibesine. Açlıktan mideleri kazınsa da televizyonda gösterilenlerle aynı çağda yaşıyor olmak insana bunu unutturuyor. Hayaller susuzluğu gideriyor. Hayaller tatmin ediyor!

A corrosão do tempo destrói até os maiores feitos intelectuais, torna-os pálidos, esbatidos.

Our relationship to the past is marked by deep indifference, even if we do say something to the contrary, even if we mean what we say when we say it is a matter of the greatest significance. Because it is a matter of the greatest significance, yet nevertheless we feel bound to it by a sense of duty.