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.
SALMAN RUSHDIE • The Paris Review Interviews, IV
Are your characters real-life or imaginary? STYRON I don’t know if that’s answerable. I really think, frankly, though, that most of my characters come closer to being entirely imaginary than the other way round. Maybe that’s because they all seem to end up, finally, closer to being like myself than like people I’ve actually observed. I sometimes fe
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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
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Most writers write simply out of some strong interior need, and that, I think, is the answer. A great writer, writing out of this need, will give substance to, and perhaps even explain, all the problems of the world without even knowing it, until a scholar comes along one hundred years after he’s dead and digs up some symbols. The purpose of a youn
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As for Flaubert, Madame Bovary is one of the few novels that move me in every way—not only in its style, but in its total communicability, like the effect of good poetry. What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. Its writer should, too.
SALMAN RUSHDIE • The Paris Review Interviews, IV
Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people, I’m sure of that. I had no ambition to be a writer.
SALMAN RUSHDIE • The Paris Review Interviews, IV
But I don’t think even the most conscientious and astute teachers can teach anything about style. Style comes only after long, hard practice and writing.
SALMAN RUSHDIE • The Paris Review Interviews, IV
I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me—all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed—with real names in his case, however, being letters.
SALMAN RUSHDIE • The Paris Review Interviews, IV
The business of the progression of time seems to me one of the most difficult problems a novelist has to cope with.