Writing Quotes by Salman Rushdie

We are the storytelling animal.

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— 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

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.

— 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

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what…

— 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

The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to…

— 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

No, I don't think it's fair to label Islam 'violent.' But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever…

— 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

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same…

— 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

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

— 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

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

— Salman Rushdie

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before…

— Salman Rushdie

If you want to draw people into the story, you really have to write as if you're writing a novel and make…

— Salman Rushdie

When you're writing for the screen, you have to be hyper-conscious every moment of how the audience is going to react. If…

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— 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

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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie