Author's Perspective Quotes

It was a really strange and unique sort of process for me to adapt my own book.

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write.

I don't do issue writing. I do character writing.

I think my Wallander stories give a fairly good image of the world in the 1990s. I don't regret anything about that - on the contrary!

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

I try not to let myself get too wrapped up in the image of whatever my books have become in the outside world.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy.

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

I think the best fiction is a form of psychological suspense, even though I don't really write in that idiom.

My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.

I don't write political stuff. I'm sure I've made attempts, but I don't tend to write very topical things, either. I admire those people who do because it's a talent I don't have.

When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.

Plot was always secondary in my mind.

Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn't write about as such.

The people that usually have the most trouble with my books are the ones that pick them apart from a theological point of view.

I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.

There's a saying - "Write what you know." It's bad advice if you take it as an unbreakable rule, but good advice if you use it as a foundation.

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

I've never purposefully based a character on any one person I know, but I'm certain there are amalgamations that exist.

I think I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid.