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Writer Quotes by Salman Rushdie

77 Writer quotes by Salman Rushdie

All Writer quotes Salman Rushdie’s page

Salman Rushdie says a serious writer has to write about what exists, not to pull punches or second‑guess. He notes that publishing a book becomes a worldwide event, and trying to suppress it turns into a worldwide effort too. He also finds joy when children meet strange words, because the mystery of new vocabulary makes reading feel like a game.

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A book is not completed till it's read.

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

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

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

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

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

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Realism can break a writer's heart.

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I am not in the business of suppressing books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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“Literature is disputed territory.”

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

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

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

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

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

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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…