The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame. - Salman Rushdie

[Since the fatwa of 1989, and not allowing it to affect his writings.] There was a moment when there was a 'me' floating around that had been invented to show what a bad person I was [...] "Evil." "Arrogant." "Terrible writer." "Nobody would've read him if there hadn't been an attack against his book." Et cetera. I've had to fight back against that false self. My mother used to say that her way of dealing with unhappiness was to forget it. She said, "Some people have a memory. I have a forget-ory."...
If somebody arrives from another planet who has never heard of anything that happened to me, and just has the books on the shelf and reads them chronologically, I don't think that alien would think, Something terrible happened to this writer in 1989. The books go on their own journey. And that was really an act of will.

He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll, or even, more simply, their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis; as well as singing competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming and, of course, beauty contests.

Do not contemplate what lies beyond failure while you are still trying to succeed.