Salman Rushdie Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

  Salman Rushdie

  Falling In Love, Book, Essence

• 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)

• A book is not completed till it's read.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book

• What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Becoming One, Development

  Salman Rushdie (2010). “Midnight's Children”, p.133, Random House

• It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Offended You, Easy

• The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Events, Publishing

• I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Play, Stories

• Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It's the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Ideas, Fiction

  Interview with Terry Gilliam, www.believermag.com. March 2003.

• The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

  Salman Rushdie

  Real, Book, Fall

• I grew up kissing books and bread.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Reading, Kissing

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “Is nothing sacred?”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

• I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.

  Salman Rushdie

  Art, Book, Light

  Salman Rushdie (2011). “The Moor's Last Sigh”, p.240, Random House

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Writing, Demand

• Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Reading

• It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Mean, Always Trying

  "'I have the hatred in a trunk in storage'". Interview with Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. August 29, 2005.

• It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Years, May

  "TalkAsia" with Monita Rajpal, www.cnn.com. February 8, 2013.

• I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Reading, Numbers

• 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

• You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end.

  Salman Rushdie

  Smart, Stupid, Book

• This was an age before e-books. We all knew that the only way you can allow a book to survive in print in the long term is in paperback. The hardback has a certain life, and then it stops having that. It stops selling, and if you want the book to just stay around there has to be a paperback edition. So if there were not a paperback edition the book would eventually disappear from the shelves, and we would have lost the battle.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Long, Age

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Want, Pages

• 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

• ...The lesson [comic books] taught children- or this child, at any rate- was perhaps the unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured the most lovingly; and that this exceptionality was a treasure so great that it had to be concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a 'secret identity'.

  Salman Rushdie

  Children, Book, Secret Identity

• Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Soul, Body

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “Is nothing sacred?”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

• In our time, we have become too interested in the artist and his or her character and experience as a way of understanding art. In my view, you should be able to read a book or see a film without knowing a single thing about conditions or circumstances or character of the artist, and experience the work to the full without such information. Sometimes I feel - speaking for myself - that people know much too much about me, and I wish people knew less and could just read these books and respond to them purely as words on a page.

  Salman Rushdie

  Art, Book, Character

  Source: pen.org

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