Salman Rushdie · Imaginary Homelands

Yes, you can definitely write for your self and your self alone. And at the same time… for others as well. 

Call it simultaneity. Simultaneity is not only possible, in places like the Caribbean, it is essential to survival.

We are all Everything Everywhere All At Once, if we only look closely.

I Write for Myself, My Five Best Friends, and 9 Million Ot... See more

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to wh... See more

There is also a kind of writer who believes that human experience is universal, so his experience is enough to know everyone else’s. What’s the big deal, these privileged writers will ask: Why not encourage writers to reach a “wide” “mainstream” audience? Even if they want to experiment, they should know tradition first. In other words: “You have t

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Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talke... See more

Works of imagination bleed together with the world they extrapolate from. The writing process begins in the writer, the life; it branches off onto paper, into artifice; but the final restless resting place of every written thing is the solitary life of the reader. There it hibernates, a cluster of stray images, forgotten incitements and conversatio

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