People often call 'If I Stay' my baby novel, and I have to correct them. It's not my first book. It's just the first one anybody paid attention to.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.
My first book was the book that changed my life.
The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.
My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved.
My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.
Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.
I've never written a children's book, but when people meet me for the first time and I say I write books, they invariably reply, 'Children's books?' Maybe it's something about my face.
All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning.
It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.
I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.