Salman Rushdie · Imaginary Homelands
While finishing the book, I wrote to a novelist friend and asked him whether I sounded naïve in my approach. Of course you do, he said, and that’s the only way to write anything in a dying world. In fact, to write any book is an act of practically fanatic devotion, he said, because to write a book is to insist on the possibility of a future in whic... See more
Elvia Wilk • Fandom as Methodology: On Fan-Nonfiction and Finding the Joy of Mutual Delusion
Look, there’s only one person a writer should listen to, pay any attention to. It’s not any damn critic. It’s the reader. And that doesn’t mean any compromise or sellout. The writer must criticize his own work as a reader. Every day I pick up the story or whatever it is I’ve been working on and read it through. If I enjoy it as a reader then I know
... See moreSALMAN RUSHDIE • The Paris Review Interviews, IV
And be sure of this, I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no feeling. Goddamn it, feeling is what I like in art, not craftiness and the hiding of feelings.