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'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

• When I was writing The Satanic Verses, if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Islam, Satanic

  "A translated man". Interview with James Campbell, www.theguardian.com. September 29, 2006.

• When you're writing for the screen you're really thinking all the time of what you have to do to make sure that they have the information that they need, that the emotional thread is not snapped, that the story moves at the right speed, to keep the audience hopefully sitting on the edge of their seats or else weeping or laughing.

  Salman Rushdie

  Moving, Writing, Emotional

  Source: www.cnn.com

• If you want to draw people into the story, you really have to write as if you're writing a novel and make these actually-existing people, including the actually-existing person with my name, into a believable person on the page. And that requires distance. That requires not being right up against the events you're talking about.

  Salman Rushdie

  Distance, Writing, Names

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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)

Page 1 of 2

← Prev

1

2

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin