Some quotations from Jens Bjørneboe:

Literature must have a religious dimension if it is really to be literature at all. An unmetaphysical poem is artistically speaking an unrealistic poem; it is false if it conveys nothing of life's macabre double bottom, of all things' ambiguity. If a writer is not clear that our whole crumb of a human life is one long wandering on thin ice over coal-black water, then everything he writes is boring. It is insignificant.

Arnulf Øverland at 70

I've been writing for eight years, and it is only now that I'm beginning to discover what I've actually let myself in for. It's incomprehensible that anyone engages in something which is so utterly impossible. Every word, every comma, every sentence is a problem. Nothing writes itself any more, every page I produce I regard with the very deepest suspicion.

from an interview in Aftenposten (1959)

It's well known that madness doesn't always express itself in a lack of logic, but just as often in the fact that logic is all that remains of reason; counting and ordering is all that's left of the lunatic's consciousness. The meaninglessness screams, but the pedantry is perfect. Everything is made by a mad schoolmaster.

from Powderhouse

Laughter means distance. Where laughter is absent, madness begins. The moment one takes the world with complete seriousness one is potentially insane. The whole art of learning to live means holding fast to laughter; without laughter the world is a torture chamber, a dark place where dark things will happen to us, a horror show filled with bloody deeds of violence.

from Moment of Freedom