Charlie Rose: Do you read reviews?
Salman Rushdie: I speed read them.
Rushdie on reflecting both reality and fantasy in his novels: ...The actual history, what happened, the politics and so on, that's relatively easy to get. What you need as a writer is ordinary life. You need to know if people get angry, what terms of abuse do they use? If people are having a wedding feast, what's actually on the table?...
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Margaret Atwood on her short stories: It's an intermediate form. It's not a book of great short stories that are all different from one another. It's not the box of assorted chocolates.
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Charlie Rose: What's the hardest part for you?
John Grisham: ...I don't enjoy the outlining and making myself go through this process of laying out the whole book. Sometimes that'll take a year or two...
Grisham on stealing: Writers steal everything. There's nothing original here.
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Charlie Rose (quoting a reviewer): A tour de force . . . masterpiece. . .Do you find that these people who are so gifted in their powers of analysis also tell you things about your novel you hadn't thought about?
Ian McEwan: Noooo . . . sometimes people order their thoughts in ways which I find that I can take something from . . . the publishing world is a world much like the film world in which intensifiers need to be used . . .masterpiece just means someone liked it a whole lot . . . one should not be too taken in by this...
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David Foster Wallace on writing for publication: Writing for publication is a very weird thing because part of you is a nerd and you want to sit in libraries and you don't want to be bothered and you're very shy. And another part of you is the worst ham of all time: look at me, look at me, look at me, and you have fantasies about writing something that makes everybody drop to one knee . . .
[More interesting soundbites from the series of interviews here]
