Salman Rushdie Quotes

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I advise all my novel students to write in the company of 'Veronica Mars.'

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

I read a lot of fiction.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

I know how to write fiction well.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.