That sentence was the only thing I knew, all the way, [throughout] those 3,600 pages. I wanted the book to end with that sentence, and I wanted to be in a mental state where I could say that and mean that: ‘I’m no longer an author’. Because this is also a book about wanting to be a literary writer, having ambition to be a writer, it’s about literature and life and where they mix, and the problem for me in my life is that I don’t think I live my life as I should. I live it in literature, I live it in reading, and I want that to end.
— Knausgaard, interview
Notes from a Room 