Quotes on Writing

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

When I walk up on that shore in Florida, I want millions of those AARP sisters and brothers to look at me and say, 'I'm going to go write that novel I thought it was too late to do. I'm going to go work in Africa on that farm that those people need help at. I'm going to adopt a child. It's not too late, I can still live my dreams.'

If you have not done things worthy of being written about, at least write things worthy of being read.

The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.

There are three difficulties in authorship; to write any thing worth the publishing — to find honest men to publish it — and to get sensible men to read it.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.

Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority.

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.

The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about."

It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

I was so long writing my review that I never got around to reading the book.

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.

Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him.

Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to be read.

You could be writing the book that changes your life.

We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.