Writer Quotes by Salman Rushdie

A book is not completed till it's read.

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

“Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

Realism can break a writer's heart.

— Salman Rushdie

“Literature is disputed territory.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in…

— Salman Rushdie

Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.

— Salman Rushdie

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

— Salman Rushdie

Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have…

— Salman Rushdie

“Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."…

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human…

— Salman Rushdie

I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And,…

— Salman Rushdie

I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to…

— Salman Rushdie

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than…

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say.…

— Salman Rushdie

“When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field,…

— Salman Rushdie

...The lesson [comic books] taught children- or this child, at any rate- was perhaps the unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the…

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

Every Day Is for the Thief, by turns funny, mournful, and acerbic, offers a portrait of Nigeria in which anger, perhaps the…

— Salman Rushdie

I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the…

— Salman Rushdie

This was an age before e-books. We all knew that the only way you can allow a book to survive in print…

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

I am not in the business of suppressing books.

— Salman Rushdie

“The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.

— Salman Rushdie

It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.

— Salman Rushdie

Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

— Salman Rushdie