Salman Rushdie Quotes

The best books arise from some ultimate question in the author.

I started out writing stories because that's all I wanted to read, but now I don't know if I'll ever write one again.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

Listen, I wrote 10 unsuccessful books before I broke through, so I'm looking all the time to keep my books fascinating. I want to write what people want to read, not push any message.

I was very fortunate that my first novel captivated the imaginations of so many readers who asked for a sequel. After that, one book led to another as I discovered other facets to my characters I wanted to investigate further.

Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through.

Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.

Writers are frequently asked why they wrote their first book. A more interesting answer might come from asking them why they wrote their second one.

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.

When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go AWOL, and then I've nothing to write.

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.

The Q I loathe and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: 'Where,' the reader asks, 'do you get your ideas?' It's a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, 'I don't know.'

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.

I'm of the ilk of writers that feels you have to be open to the inspiration.

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

Once I have the grain of an idea, it haunts me until I finish the story. I don't like to be haunted, of course, so immediately get to work.

It's painful to consider anything but writing.

I really absolutely loved writing my first book.