WOOD

Have you felt a kind of religious ecstasy in your life?

KNAUSGAARD

No, but they say one of the main things about religious ecstasy is a feeling of selflessness—that you yourself disappear. I feel that when I read Dostoyevsky. I can have that feeling. I can just disappear. I don’t know why, and I don’t know what it means. It’s the same thing looking at art. I feel so moved by it, but I don’t know why. And what is that?

~ James Wood & Karl Ove Knausgaard, from “Writing My Struggle: An Exchange” (Paris Review, Issue 211, Winter 2014)

Notes: Quote – With gratitude, thank you Sawsan. Photo: Mennyfox55