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

• 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

• 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 way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.

  Salman Rushdie

  Running, Writing, Eye

• In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Thinking, Typewriters

• I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

  Salman Rushdie

  Character, Writing, Thinking

  Source: bigthink.com

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Trying, Novel

  Source: brightestyoungthings.com

• All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.

  Salman Rushdie

  Religious, Art, Writing

• Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Character, Men

  "Salman Rushdie says TV dramas comparable to novels" by Vanessa Thorpe, www.theguardian.com. June 11, 2011.

• What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to pare everything down and find the kind of essence, the skeleton if you like, which can then be fleshed out by performance and cinematography.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Skeletons, Essence

  "Salman Rushdie brings 'Midnight's Children' to big screen". Interview with Matt Carey, www.cnn.com. May 6, 2013.

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Stories, Want

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Reading, Writing

• Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Drawing, People

• The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Thinking, Historical

• When you're writing for the screen, you have to be hyper-conscious every moment of how the audience is going to react. If you write just one scene where the audience is confused or it breaks their concentration in some way, then you've lost them, and you might never get them back.

  Salman Rushdie

  Confused, Writing, Might

  "Salman Rushdie brings 'Midnight's Children' to big screen". Interview with Matt Carey, www.cnn.com. May 6, 2013.

• If you're going to write a memoir, try to be as honest and open as you can.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Trying, Honest

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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

  Writing, Boys, Cities

  "Manhattan transfer". Interview with D.T. Max, www.theguardian.com. September 23, 2000.

• As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, People, Kind

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