Salman Rushdie Quotes

I used to think that when I finished a book, I was finished with it. But it's like a wonderful Hydra. Every time a head disappears, more heads appear, so I will be writing for the rest of my life. The more books I write, the more books I find that I still have to write about. I use it like an inspiration, and that's wonderful.

Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis and Joe have been in my head. They're always there. I started these guys because I like them.

My favorite book is always the one I'm working on at the moment.

I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

As a writer, I've always been somebody who's been productive and hustled hard.

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.

Writing takes a lot of patience. It usually takes me a year to write a book. One time, it took me 14 years to write a book, not that I worked on it every day.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

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.

After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

I'm still surprised to be an author. I wonder what I'll write next?

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.

There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

I write everywhere. I've written books while I was on planes, at Disney World, and in multiple countries of which I am not a native. It can be a struggle to make word count sometimes, but I will persevere!

You write, hoping to write a good book; that's it.

When I'm writing, I try not to think things like, 'Gosh, I have to finish writing this book.' Books are very long and it's easy to get discouraged. Instead I think to myself, 'Wow, I have this great story idea, and today I'm going to write two pages of it. That's all - just two pages.'

I don't think many of us launched ourselves into the world of writing books fully formed.