Nobel Prize Conversations

“When I’m writing very well, then I don’t have to write. It’s just writing itself, if that’s a possible way to say it”

Is the creative process different in the fields of art, literature and music? In a podcast conversation, literature laureate Jon Fosse speaks about all three fields and how they are similar in many ways. American painter Mark Rothko is mentioned as a source of inspiration as well as art in general. We also get insights into Fosse’s childhood where music was large part of his life.

Today Jon Fosse enjoys a world of silence and avoids the noise of the world if possible. He describes his writing process, how he enjoys writing by hand with fountain pens and how a reader can tell if a book is written by hand or not. He also speaks about his relationship to God and religion. 

This conversation was published on 18 July, 2024. Podcast host Adam Smith is joined by Clare Brilliant.

Below you find a transcript of the podcast interview. The transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors.

MUSIC

Jon Fosse:  It’s very easy to use a lot of words and then write in a complicated way. That’s the easiest thing to do. But what’s hard to manage? It’s to write in a simple and deep way.

Adam Smith: One of the things that strikes me as most attractive about Jon Fosse is the way he wears his erudition so lightly. Despite the obvious depth of his learning and the great complexity of the ideas expressed in this huge variety of writing, he gets his points across in this conversation so straightforwardly. He left me at least with some really beautiful images, a picture of him writing alone. In this place, he calls a shelter from the wind. The vision of him writing not just with his head, but with his whole body and an image of him gazing at a single point out of the window and extracting. Pretty much extracting everything you can from that place. A bit like when you’ve seen a good movie, I found these scenes from the conversation replaying in my head for days afterwards. I truly hope that you will find this conversation with Fosse every bit as captivating as I did. 

MUSIC

Clare Brilliant: This is Nobel Prize Conversations. Our guest is Jon Fosse, the 2023 literature laureate. He received the prize for his innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable. Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. This podcast was produced in cooperation with Fundación Ramón Areces. Jon Fosse is a Norwegian poet, novelist and playwright. He’s published almost 70 works, which have been translated into over 40 languages. In this conversation, he talks about finding his Catholic faith after seeking solace in cathedrals while touring with his plays, his fascination with Mark Rothko’s paintings and how he can tell if a book is written with a pen. But first we enter Jon Fosse’s world, a world dominated by silence.

SILENCE

Smith: When we were corresponding about this podcast, I asked you whether you had a pair of headphones you could wear, and you said, no, I don’t listen to music. That’s quite a surprising statement. Is that true that you really don’t listen to music?  

Fosse: Yes, that’s true. I only listen to music when I go to concerts, that’s the only time. When I was young, I was very much into music. When I was a teenager, I listened to music all the time. I played the guitar, both the classical guitar and small pieces by Bach and electric guitar in a boys band. Then I stopped playing and I stopped listening to music in my late teens, and I started writing. The only thing I listen to is when I’m driving longer distances; I’m listening to audio books. 

Smith: I suppose the writing became the music, if you like. 

Fosse: The writing became the music. No doubt. 

Smith: It is unusual to live without it, and most people put it on as a sort of background. You’d find that disturbing, would you to have it? 

Fosse: I always find it disturbing. When I am in a room where they play music, I try not to hear it. Yesterday I went to my dentist, and of course he had music in the background. As far as I manage I try to not listen to it. 

Smith: Yes. It’s hard to avoid.  

Fosse: I have some friends that are musicians and I’ve been doing readings together with them. When we take a cab, when we are going to do a job, they always dislike to hear music. They always ask the taxi driver to take away the music. I think this music, it’s disturbing for a lot of people and there’s a lot of noise pollution, to put it that way, all over the place. 

Smith: Exactly. It’s harder and harder to avoid it depending on where you live, but basically it’s everywhere. It’s a particularly interesting thing to discuss with you, of course, because you are renowned for putting silence in your work, in your plays and also in your prose. Your search for silence extends to just everyday life and trying to avoid the surrounding hubbub. 

Fosse: I never watch television. I never listen to the radio. I hardly ever go to see a film. I go to the theater now and then, and as I said, now and then I go to a concert with classical music. I love organ concerts where they are playing music by Bach, the great one. 

Smith: You grew up in a very quiet place. 

Fosse: Yes, you can say so. 

Smith: Was it a landscape that, if you like, evokes quietness? It’s tempestuous, I suppose, with its weather and its dramatic scenery, the west of Norway. But at the same time, if people were looking for retreat, I suppose it’s the sort of place that they would go. 

Fosse: Yes. Some places at least. We are all famous for all the bad weather. There’s a lot of rain. It rains most of the time, and it’s quite windy there. You imagine Norway, it is mountains and snow but in my coastal landscape, it isn’t like that. It’s more like Britain or Ireland. 

Smith: Dark, depressing.  

Fosse: Very dark, very depressing. It can be gray for months, but I like it and there are many nuances in the gray. If you start looking at it that way and suddenly it open up and you see the blue sky. It’s silent and it’s gray. 

Smith: I suppose what you just said, many nuances in gray, and then suddenly it opens up and you see the blue sky is also a description of your writing. 

Fosse: It’s the same if you live by the sea. It’s always changing, the colour of the sea. It’s never the same and neither are the movements. You have the basic rhythm of the waves, but it keeps on changing. It’s the same and it’s changing all the time. I grew up by the sea, by the Hardanger Fjord and now I’m living in central Oslo, but I keep two places in the western part of Norway. One is as close to the sea as you can get. The balcony is going over the sea. My cabin has a view to where the Sonne fjord goes into the North sea, the ocean. There’s an opening of that where I can see the ocean too. Both places are really great for me, but you need to like it. In my family aren’t that happy with the sea and the rain. 

Smith: People acquainted with your writing will know that there often are people staring out at a single point. Asle, for instance, in ‘Aliss at the Fire‘ staring at the sea, concentrating on small changes. Obviously it’s something very important for you. 

Fosse: Yes. This situation, someone looking out the window, that’s one of the reocurring situation in my writing. When it occurred the first time, I don’t exactly remember, but since then it keeps on coming back. In ‘Septology’ it’s the same with many places. He’s just looking at the fjord. I’ve written a play called the ‘A Summers Day’. The basic situation there is an elderly lady looking at the sea, that goes through the whole play, and she is remembering the day when her husband disappeared on the sea.  

Smith: It’s obviously a very personal experience for you.  

Fosse: I simply grew up, as I said, close to a fjord. When I had to walk to school, we walked along the fjord for a couple of kilometers and you hear this sound of the waves of the sea and the way it keeps changing all the time. The nuances, I think where you grew up, it’s very formative in many ways. You learn a language in a place and this or that social act, dialect or normalised language or whatever. You learn that in the place and you connect the word also to the place where you learnt it. Where you first learnt the word window, you connect it to the first window you saw and understood what a window is. The same goes for everything, for such basic birds as roof, floor, stone and water.  

Smith: That rootedness. Tell me about your writing, the actual process of writing. Clearly it’s something that gives you great pleasure. How did you find originally that it was a pleasurable activity to write? 

Fosse: I guess I was around 12 years old, as I told you. I was playing the guitar a lot and I also tried to write small tunes and I wrote about the lyrics and the melody. That was the first thing I wrote. Then I tried also to write small poems and short stories. I started very early, somehow I liked it. It gave me shelter from the wind to put it that way. I found a place where I could stay alone and do whatever I wanted in my writing. It was in a kind of opposition to the writing in the school, where you had to write almost the opposite. I found as I normally put it, a place inside myself, a secret place, and I can go to that place and start writing from that place. I found that place when I was in my early teens, and I will be 65 and the place is the same. It’s been there for 50 years. 

Smith: How very satisfying to have your life!  

Fosse: Yes. My way of writing, I prefer not to prepare anything, to do any research, think of the structure or whatever. I just sit down. I know if I’m going to write a play or a kind of fiction or of course a poem, and that’s the only thing I know. Then I start and at the beginning it has what is needed. It has a kind of necessity to it that forces the rest of the text in a way. I have this view on writing, don’t think, but it’s an act of listening. I’m listening to something when I’m writing to what I’m actually writing. Writing to what I’ve written and then to something that brings the story or what you call it. Keep going. When I’m writing very well, then I don’t have to write. It’s just writing itself, if that’s a possible way to say it. 

Smith: It’s a lovely way to say it. You are listening to some narrator within yourself telling you what to write. It’s a very appealing image. The process though of translating what your mind is telling you to what your hand is actually writing is hard. Many writers would say that you have to go through a great apprenticeship to teach your hand to do what your mind is wanting it to do. 

Fosse: You’re writing with your hands, not with your brain, as Beckett said. He was completely right. It’s a kind of playing to me. I started as a musician, as I told you, and I stopped playing. I turned to writing and writing is comparable to playing music for me. When doing that, you don’t think first, you’re improvising, you don’t think like that. You just do it. Martin Heidegger, he said that art happens. It’s like that for me. It just happens. When writing a novel or a play or whatever, at a certain point I get this feeling that it’s already written, not inside me, but out there somewhere. My job is to write down what is already written before it disappears.  

Smith: Before it flies out the window towards the field. 

Fosse: Yes, I think writing is a kind of gift. A new novel or a new play, it’s a gift I get. Because I feel it’s a gift I can’t write all the time. I need to have breaks or pauses when I don’t write. You can’t get gifts all the time. 

Smith: In order to be receptive to gathering up your gift when it comes, is there a special way that you write? Does your situation for actually writing have to be a particular place or a way of writing? 

Fosse: No, I’ve been a writer for so many years, and this habit is so into my way of living that I think I can write more or less all over the place, everywhere. But I have to write by hand, not on a computer. I can sit on an airplane and have a notebook and one of my fountain pens and write there, for instance. That wasn’t possible for me earlier. The ideal situation for me is that I at least have one week with no disturbances. Then I start writing very early in the morning. For many years, I woke up so that I could stop writing at eight, nine. For some years I have woken up quite early. Then I wrote my whole ‘Septology’ between five in the night and nine in the morning. 

Smith: There’s something about those wee hours, you are in good company. Anthony Trollope always used to write between five and eight in the morning, didn’t they? Murakami, I think is another early writer. What is it about those early hours? 

Fosse: They are the best hours for writing I’ve experienced. Earlier I liked to drink quite a lot and I drank in the evenings and I had to be completely sober to write. If I only had a glass of red wine, I lose my precision. I’ve become somehow sentimental and I can write and I can drink afterwards, but not at the same time. But then I quit drinking at all and then I didn’t know what to do in the evening. I went to bed and went to sleep and woke up very early, and then I started writing very early. That’s how I experienced that. This is the best time for writing in a way. The world is quiet. If you’re living in a town, there are very few cars. You can hear a taxi here or there. You yourself is quiet in a specific way. You aren’t that quiet in yourself at eight in the morning as four or five in the night for sure. I also prefer to wake up and start writing as fast as possible to go from the dream world in the sleep to the conscious dream world of the writing. 

Smith: That’s interesting. No ritual sort of coffees and long breakfast to get you in the mood? 

Fosse: Yes, always. I used to be a heavy smoker. I needed my cigarettes and coffee. In later years I’ve changed to green tea and do some nicotine and caffeine I need in the morning, but that’s the only thing I need.  

Smith: You mentioned that you write with a fountain pen. 

Fosse: Yes, I saw my folks writing on the typewriter. I’m that old. I remember my first computer, it was this old dos system. You perhaps can’t even remember it. Then I had my first Mac, and it was an adventure to me, an amazing thing. You could change the font and you could have a completely clean script. When I used the typewriter, I always made typos here and there and had to change. It was ugly. I think it was much more beautiful when I had my first style writer and my first Mac. I had, for instance, the first portable Mac ever produced. It’s very strange to think about. Now these portables are all over the place, but it was Steve Jobs, he was the man. The same with the iPhone. It was Steve Jobs. You have some inventors that have changed our lives more than I think people dare to think of. I was very fascinated by the Mac roughly until Steve Jobs passed away. Since then, it’s been a boring story. I’m still using the Mac, that’s what I know how to use. But my fascination was gone. Perhaps I needed to be fascinated by something. Then my fascination changed to fountain pens, in fact. I started to collect fountain pens and use them. Earlier, I only wrote using a Mac and corrected using a fountain band when I printed out the script. Fountain pens are very peaceful and the act of writing by hand in a notebook. This is a very peaceful action. I quoted Beckett that you’re writing up by your hand, but with your hand, you get this experience that you actually are writing with your hand. It becomes much more obvious when you are actually writing by your hand, especially to me with a fountain pen and on paper. 

Smith: I like the fact that there’ve been these different phases, that there was the phases of the enjoyment of using the typewriter, which in some way is like a musical instrument, if you like.  

Fosse: Yes. The keyboard. It’s like playing on a keyboard when you are typing. These movements of the right thing when you are writing by hand, it’s also get this rhythm in another way. You can write fast or slow and you never write exactly the same way. Your handwriting, it’s always changing slightly. The musical dimension or the corporal dimension, your body is into the writing either you use a keyboard or a fountain pen.  

Smith: Exactly. It’s bringing a different sort of musicality to the whole work, because people of course look for that in the text itself, but that it’s there in the creation of the text also is lovely. 

Fosse: It’s a strange thing. I feel that the writing process at least is quite different, or I experience it as quite different when I’m using a fountain pen, I guess that has to do that. I’ve been a writer for so many years. I’ve written an enormous lot. When I started, it was something new to me, this experience of writing by hand. It was easier not to disturb yourself by thinking, to put it that way when I wrote by hand.  

Smith: There’s a more direct connection. 

Fosse: Yes. I think some writers, you can almost tell that the books have been written by hand, not on a computer, not on a typewriter. I think, for instance, the book of Knut Hamsun, to me, it’s obvious it couldn’t be written on a typewriter or a computer. 

Smith: What makes it obvious? 

Fosse: That’s very hard to describe it. It has to do with this flow I was talking about, and the inversion that he creates. It can be felt that this is really written by hand, but it isn’t that many years ago since they wrote with a goose pen and everything was written. For instance, you had the first fountain pens, it isn’t that many years ago. There’s been an enormous development in the act of writing for over 100 years. 

Smith: There’s obviously a lovely simplicity about writing by hand, the simplicity of your writing, if one could call it that. There’s a bit of a misnomer, but it’s obviously something you construct that your own reading, your own interests, you’ve already mentioned Heidegger in this conversation, are very complex and you boil it down to a simplicity of language, which is very striking. Is that purposeful? What is your thinking behind the simplicity? 

Fosse: I prefer not to have a purpose at all when writing. If you have a purpose, it’s very easy to tell when you read it. The writing, it must have its own necessity and its own logic. For me, when I write, I don’t decide that I don’t want to use that word or that word. Especially in my place, I’m writing about basic human situations and in each and every language you use very simple words to describing your daily life, actions. It’s very easy to use a lot of words and to write in a  complicated way. That’s the easiest thing. What’s hard to manage? It’s to write in a simple and deep way. My favourite painter, at least at the time being it’s Makarotto, there’s a huge simplicity to his paintings. At the same time, they are telling a lot and all the details, the repetitions and the variations are speaking all the time. 

Smith: One thing about Rothko is that if you, at least I’ve found that if you stand at different distances from his paintings, and of course if you look at them in different light, you get very different experiences. To stand just one half a meter away from a Rothko is an utterly different experience from the experience of standing at the other end of a big gallery room. It is the levels of analysis. 

Fosse: It is for sure. I guess when he was painting, he had his arms, his brushes and so on, so it couldn’t be that far away from the painting. All the details I’m talking about, you have perhaps to go rather close to see them. All the variations from a distance, you see only that colour with that colour or something like that. To me it is just a standard. Let’s say I stand one meter away from the painting and let the painting talk to me. Then it’s not this or that. It’s the wholeness of it that is speaking to me and it’s in all kind of writing to me. Same with art, it’s not the details, it’s the wholeness it is about. Wholeness has a kind of silent spirit. In a good production in the theater, it’s not the acting or the scenography. It’s the wholeness of the production that makes it great. This wholeness, it can’t speak, it’s silent. It has a silent voice, and that’s a spiritual voice. I think to me, it’s this spiritual voice that is speaking very clearly from the paintings of Rothko. In each paining this spirit is saying very different things. I don’t know how he managed, but he managed to do it. He painted those paintings. If it is easy to explain then it is no art at all, as everyone could do it then. 

Smith: But then, as you say, apparent simplicity, but such complexity contained within. 

Fosse: Yes. Deepness, there’s a lot underneath, there’s a lot in a Rothko painting. Each painting, speaking of the greater ones, it’s a universe you could say. 

Smith: Just to draw the parallel with your work, a great deal of darkness in Rothko’s painting. 

Fosse: Yes, of course. But Rothko himself denied that he was trying to paint his depression or what you call it. I think he painted more to get rid of himself than to express himself. I’m writing much more to get rid of myself than to express myself. I don’t believe in these people, oh, I want to express it. I’m not interested at all, not in what I might want to express. I don’t find it interesting at all. Rothko isn’t expressing in that way. He’s creating art, art is something else than your subjective experiences or something like that. It’s basically a transformation. You are transcending or opening up for a transcendental dimension in the process of writing or in good art at all in general, I would say. It’s all about that. Beckett, once again, said that he didn’t write about anything. If I would quote him and say, I’m not writing about anything, nothing. But of course when you’re reading a novel or a play or whatever, of course it’s something about it that attracts us. It’s a kind of plot to a certain level. They call it the universe run by a lot of very complicated rules, different for each. They’re not conscious, but then I have to know them somehow. That’s the same with Rothko. When he painted a picture, it’s a universe and the way to describe it as to say that there are rules for it. It’s a kind of language game they use with the science phrase. But these language games are so complicated that no brain, if it’s good art isn’t possible to have a conscious relation to them. 

Smith: Whether you are an onlooker with a Rothko or a reader of your text, it’s very hard not to bring a search for meaning to your encounter with the work. If you are writing without searching for meaning, you are simply creating, then is the reader wrong to try and find meaning in what you’re writing? 

Fosse: No, it’s in a certain way all about meaning. It’s not about communication to communicate this or that, this message to, as an advertisement or something like that. It’s about meaning and what is meaning? If you start thinking about it, what is it and why does it exist? Gardiner the philosopher, he said that meaning is a wonder. I agree that we can understand, for instance, the complexity of a Rothko painting to such a degree as it is possible or understand the level of great writing to such a degree. It’s a kind of wonder that it isn’t possible to explain neither the process of Bach composing his music or the experience I get from listening to his music. It’s a wonder. Then I opened up a kind of spiritual dimension, and I had the pleasure of provoking a lot of people by thanking God when I made my speech at the banquet and my lecture. 

Smith: Let’s go there. You grew up in the Protestant traditions of western Norway. 

Fosse: My father and mother, they were believers, but in a very conventional, traditional way in a society. You never go to church. Normally you go when there’s a wedding or a burial or something. But my grandfather, he was a Quaker. My grandmother on the other side, she was a kind of puritan. I knew about it and it was in my family, but the society I grew up in wasn’t ruled or defined by these ideas. The people who believed in this, they were outsiders. 

Smith: There was a backdrop of Protestantism.  

Fosse: As it is in Norway and Sweden normally, I guess. It’s a very secularised society. It even was when I grew up. These Protestant societies, most of them have developed into very secularised societies that started a long time ago. In a way it’s in the center somehow of Lutheranism. When I started, mostly because of my own writing, to experience this other dimension, this invisible thing, I at a certain point started to think about God, how to use the word God and something that had to do with this unknown side of life. I also started to search for a religious community. I went to the Quakers and stayed with them. I never became an organised Quaker. As a good Quaker you shouldn’t be organised. It’s against the spirit of Quakerism. I’m basically thinking and believing as a Quaker to a large degree, even now. 

Smith: That’s interesting. You are a Quaker at heart, but have found your way to the Catholic church. 

Fosse: Yes. You can put it like that. It was the German mystic master Eckhart who helped me. He lived in the 13th century. His writing has influenced me a lot since I first read it in the eighties. What the Quakers are thinking and practicing, it’s already described by Eckhart, the meaning of it, the point of it. George Fox did it some hundred years later, but Eckhart had already thought about it 500 years earlier. In a way, true master Eckhart got an interest for the Catholic church. He wasn’t heretic, of course. He died before he came to judgment. I’m a heretic, of course but in another time. The life of a writer is a lonely life. I needed something to stick to. In Norway there are 150 Quakers. And in the whole world there are rather few.

When I started going to the Catholic mass, I felt very much at home there, to be honest. As a playwright, I travelled all around the world to see productions. Normally if a cathedral or church was open, I walked in and if it was a Catholic church, there were always someone sitting there in deep concentration praying. To see these people sitting there in this empty church or cathedral, it impressed me a lot. What I found when I started reading about the Catholicism and going to the mass, it was that the essence of Catholicism and the essence of Quakerism is approximately the same. It is about mystery of faith. It is about God in each and every human being, the inner light as the Quakers say it or as the Catholic say it; you get it when you actually eat the spiritual body of Christ. The elements in the Catholic mass, they are the same basically as they have been for 2000 years. The texts are repeated again and again, honest of the confession of the faith, etc. In the end, the words are repeated that many times that they in a way lose their normal meaning and are filled with a kind of silence. 

Smith: Absolutely. Similar to for instance, the Jesus Prayer in orthodoxy constantly repeated. It becomes something other than the words. 

Fosse: I’m praying that prayer a lot myself. 

Smith: Do you do it in the way of the 33 repetitions or some particular number? 

Fosse: No. Just repeat and repeat. As the fathers of the desert did. I just kept on repeating it. 

MUSIC  

Brilliant: I’m not familiar with the Jesus prayer myself. Adam, would you mind telling us a bit about it? 

Smith: The form of it is Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. In very few words, it contains an awful lot of concepts. It sort of encapsulates the essentials of Christianity. Lord Jesus Christ places him in sort of ascendants, and then Son of God says who he is, and then have mercy on me, a sinner is confessional. That act of confession and recognition of one’s sins is contained within that prayer. It’s sort of plenitude in little.  

Brilliant: Jon Fosse talks about the fathers of the desert using it. What does that mean? 

Smith: The Desert Fathers were a bunch of hermits in the third and fourth century, mainly I think in Egypt. They were early Christians who retired to the desert, living mainly alone, and dedicated themselves completely to thinking about the nature of God and vibe with each other in aestheticism. They tried to sort of be more awful to themselves than the next one in the next cave in order to heighten their sense of devotion, I suppose, and punish themselves for their sins and all the rest of it. I think the Jesus Prayer was first recorded on wall of one of those caves. There was an author called Helen Waddell who translated some of the sayings of the Desert Fathers, and it was one of the books that used to hang around at home. I used to dip into these and find them very confusing. That was my first acquaintance with the Desert Fathers. 

Brilliant: It’s interesting that the prayer did sort of spread out of the desert because it sounds like it’s widely used. 

Smith: Yes. Simplicity must be very appealing. Also, the fact that it is used as a repetitive prayer, I suppose it’s almost like a chant. The standard practice is to say it over and over. While I suppose you might dwell on the words and the meaning of the words, after a while, it becomes sort of mantra. It’s a way of calming down or cleansing your mind. It was very interesting to listen to Fosse talk about the fact that he likes the prayer because it ties in so well with the extensive repetition he uses as a device in his writing. We talked about that. Let’s return to the conversation.  

MUSIC  

Smith: Repetition, of course, is a huge part of your own work, and people very frequently describe your work as being sort of hymnal, or it could be in a liturgical setting. What does repetition bring to you when you are writing, when you’re actually writing the thing and you find your hand repeating the phrase or repeating the idea. Why? 

Fosse: I think it’s quite simple that I moved from being obsessed by music to being obsessed by writing. I wanted to create a kind of music when writing. What’s fundamental to all kind of music is repetitions and variations. To create the literature as a kind of music, you need repetition. If you look for it in almost every good writer, you find a lot of repetitions. Go to Hemingway, for instance, or the one I’m translating at the time, it’s Gerald Murnane. He is a great writer and he keeps on repeating all the time, but he’s known for his repetition as I am. I use the word pause, short pause, long pause a lot. That’s to get the right flow. I need it to be like that. In my fiction, I can’t use that word or not as frequently as in my plays. My German translator, he had this theory that in my fiction, the repetitions are playing the same role as the word pause or silence in my plays. I think he got the point. 

Smith: Yes. It makes you stop and reflect on what you are reading. 

Fosse: Yeah. It becomes a silence and silences. Never the same, expressing quite different things.  

Smith: This takes us back to where we started, the search for silence and the difficulty of finding it in today’s world. The importance of finding it.  

Fosse: I think you have to manage somehow to rest in yourself and to cope with your destiny as a human being. What we see not that far away, it’s around death. You need to get some kind of science into yourself, not to get afraid of dying. I think all this music and all the mess doing things all the time, you’re trying to escape that. People are running and trying to live as healthy as possible. They never feel bad. 

Smith: Yes. You’ll never win that game. 

Fosse: Try to get some peace and quiet.  

MUSIC  

Fosse: My writing, if you don’t like it or it doesn’t give you anything that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s okay. But I’m of course really happy that quite a lot of people find quite a lot in my writing to put it that way. 

Smith: That’s lovely and permissive. Take me or leave me, but it’s fine either way. 

Fosse: Yes. You’re not a bad human being if you don’t understand maths on a certain level or music on a certain level. If you don’t understand my writing, you simply don’t understand it. You don’t have that kind of air.  

Smith: That’s a perfect end point. I think it’s particularly nice in today’s world where everybody is pushing and pushing for the STEM subjects and maths and everything to tell people it’s okay not to understand maths.  

Fosse: It’s okay not to understand a lot and not to manage a lot. We can’t manage everything, any of us. We aren’t that clever and we shouldn’t try to be it either, I think. 

Smith: Thank you very much. 

Fosse: Thank you. 

MUSIC

Brilliant: You just heard Nobel Prize Conversations. If you’d like to learn more about Jon Fosse, you can go to nobelprize.org where you’ll find a wealth of information about the prizes and the people behind the discoveries.

Nobel Prize Conversations is a podcast series with Adam Smith, a co-production of Filt and Nobel Prize Outreach. The producer for this episode was Karin Svensson. The editorial team also includes Andrew Hart, Olivia Lundqvist, and me, Clare Brilliant. Music by Epidemic sound. If you’re interested in more literary conversation, check out our episodes with 2021 literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, or 1986 laureate Wole Soyinka. You can find previous seasons and conversations on Acast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening. 

Nobel Prize Conversations is produced in cooperation with Fundación Ramón Areces.

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