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Writing Quotes by Salman Rushdie

87 Writing quotes by Salman Rushdie

All Writing quotes Salman Rushdie’s page

Salman Rushdie claims we are storytelling animals who must pay attention to characters and their worlds. He notes that a writer loses the audience when they become bored or even throw vegetables. He believes knowing yourself is the first step to writing.

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My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

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I didn't become a writer to write about me.

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We are the storytelling animal.

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In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.

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Realism can break a writer's heart.

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Until you know who you are you can’t write.

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In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

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I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

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Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

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“From 'The Suicide', a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman: 'Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.”

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Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.

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I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to…

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In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

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I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I…

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I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I…

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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside…

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I grew up falling in love with kind of story, amazing, wonder tale of the East, which if you're a child growing…

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When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call…

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Science fiction is where I started out, really. When I was a kid, I was a complete addict of science fiction. It…

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“A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world…

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If you want to be a serious writer, then you have to write what there is to write about. If you're going…

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In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part,…

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Because I've always felt, whether the fatwa or whatever, the writer's great weapon is the truth and integrity of his voice. And…

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What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to…

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The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you…

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And at the end of the day, there was an attempt to suppress a book. The book wasn't suppressed. It's freely available…

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Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers…

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I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you…

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When you're writing for the screen you're really thinking all the time of what you have to do to make sure that…

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I suppose authoritarians don't like being made fun of because authoritarian rulers have a very inflated sense of themselves and don't like…

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Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about…

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“When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have…

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I have a general feeling that writers and artists who are in this peculiar situation, of being a persecuted artist, all anyone…

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“More seriously-and this is probably why there has been a lot of garbage talked about a lost generation-it was easy to see,…

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One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

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Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

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I became a writer because I got addicted to story. The first storyteller in my life was my father.

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I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

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When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.

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More by Salman Rushdie

If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.

It's a terrible thing that your life turns into a good story.

Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body…

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

If you want to be a serious writer, then you have to write what there is to write about. If you're going to pull…

“Después de exigir mi marcha, ya no posees jurisdicción en lo concerniente a mi salud.”

If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.

I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall…

I'd wanted to create a storm so that I could become more famous and richer.

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done,…

“...proving once again that there was no escape from recurrence.”

“information, in a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that revealed the extent to which he had internalised the adversarial fragmentation of American culture and made it a…

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones.…

I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.

The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their…