Salman Rushdie Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.

  Salman Rushdie

  Dream, Stars, Writing

  Salman Rushdie, Michael Reder (2000). “Conversations with Salman Rushdie”, p.11, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Writing, Creation

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “In good faith”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “In good faith”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Knows, Who You Are

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Self, Best Self

  "'I have the hatred in a trunk in storage'". Interview with Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. August 24, 2005.

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, People, Forgiving

  Salman Rushdie (1989). “The Satanic Verses”, New York, N.Y. : Viking

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Horizon

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Writing, Demand

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Fighting, Trying

• The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Together, Different

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Character, Novel

• I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Writing, Years

• 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 the characters I've got.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Writing, Character

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Difficult Questions, Speak

• In the experience of art, time seems not to exist. When I'm writing and think, "I've been working for two hours," I've actually been working for seven.

  Salman Rushdie

  Art, Writing, Thinking

• The PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award is a way of spotlighting individual cases. If you look at the history of the award, the freedom rate is very high: a very high percentage of people who receive those awards are freed in the next six months to a year. The only weapon there is attention, but interestingly it works.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, People, Attention

  Source: pen.org

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Thinking, Exception

  "'Everybody needs to get thicker skins'". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. July 10, 2008.

• I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.

  Salman Rushdie

  Hate, Book, Writing

• When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Writing, Needs

• I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Trying, Strive

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “In good faith”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I have a general feeling that writers and artists who are in this peculiar situation, of being a persecuted artist, all anyone ever asks about is the persecution. It may well be that's the last thing in the world they want to talk about. There were many years in which every journalist in the world wanted to talk to me, but nobody wanted to talk to me about my work. That felt deeply frustrating because I felt there was an attempt to stifle me as an artist. The best revenge I could have was to write.

  Salman Rushdie

  Revenge, Writing, Artist

  Source: pen.org

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Baby, Pain, Writing

• I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.

  Salman Rushdie

  New York, Writing, Years

• When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Writing, World

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