For many years it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months travel the world through coups d'etat assassinations famines massacres and tsunamis and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle.

I can't live without my smartphone but I really geek on coding. It's not so much technology that I like but puzzle solving.

A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt 'Don't bother me - I've got important work to do.'

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent scurrilous wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me that editing process feels like a form of play like a puzzle that needs solving and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing.

Like a morning dream life becomes more and more bright the longer we live and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.

Whatever the medium there is the difficulty challenge fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain With grammar and nonsense and learning Good liquor I stoutly maintain Gives genius a better discerning.

Who in the world am I? Ah that's the great puzzle.

Movies don't look hard but figuring it out getting the shape of it getting everybody's character right and having it be funny make sense and be romantic it's creating a puzzle. Yes having been a writer for so long I have an awareness of when things are going awry but it doesn't mean I know how to fix them.