Halldor Laxness
Halldor Laxness
Halldór Kiljan Laxness; born Halldór Guðjónsson; 23 April 1902 – 8 February 1998) was a twentieth-century Icelandic writer. Laxness wrote poetry, newspaper articles, plays, travelogues, short stories, and novels. Major influences included August Strindberg, Sigmund Freud, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht and Ernest Hemingway. He received the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature; he is the only Icelandic Nobel laureate...
NationalityIcelandic
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth23 April 1902
CityReykjavik, Iceland
CountryIceland
When a man has a flower in his life he builds a house.
A free man can live on fish.Independence is better than meat
You have fettered yourself of your own free will, man-break the fetters!
Of all the creatures that man kills for his amusement there is only one that he kills out of hatred—other men. Man hates nothing as much as himself. That is why war is called the leprosy of the human soul.
For man is essentially alone, and one should pity him and love him and grieve with him.
My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives' work, have not been preserved for posterity.
Love of, and respect for, the humble routine of everyday life and its creatures was the only moral commandment which carried conviction when I was a child.
From the very first, my countrymen have followed my literary career, now criticizing, now praising my work, but hardly ever letting a single word be buried in indifference.
The world is a song, but we do not know whether it is a good song because we have nothing to compare it with.
It is a matter of simple fact that Icelanders have always been notoriously indolent.
I feel a physical happiness when spring is coming.
I spent my entire childhood in an environment in which the mighty of the earth had no place outside story books and dreams.
My motto is strong packaging, clear addressing.
It's an old saying that one still has to know something, despite everything.