Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
Until you know who you are you can’t write.
When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.
If you want to be a serious writer, then you have to write what there is to write about. If you're going to pull your punches and second-guess yourself and not do things because you're worried, then don't write. Stay home and do something else.
Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.
When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.
When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.
I do not read the works of Salman Rushdie, I write them. By the time I have finished writing them all I can think of is never reading them again. It's so deep, your involvement with a book, that once it's finished, then you are really done with it.
Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.
When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.
I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.
What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to pare everything down and find the kind of essence, the skeleton if you like, which can then be fleshed out by performance and cinematography.
I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.
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