Salman Rushdie Quotes

I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.

Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.

I don't have a great imagination to share something with you that you don't know, so it's about interpreting things - a dialogue.

I think of myself as a storyteller.

One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

I don't consider what I do 'art.' It's 'storytelling.'

To me, I'm a storyteller.

I think acting, for me, is about play. It's about time, and it's about feeling, like there's a story to tell and I can tell it through my body and my voice.

When I write a story, I just wanna tell you what's in my head. It can come from real life and then turn into fantasy, stuff just rhyming. And write about what you know. I just like to tell stories that have not been told or [told] from my perspective.

I think what's fun about the fairytales is just seeing what everybody interprets them as, which comes from the different directors and what they want to do with them.

What is one man's hate speech is another man's poetry.

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

I just want to tell great stories.

If you're singing, you're telling a story. So to tell it and tell it right, that's it.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not." "Shouldn't the storyteller believe it." "The storyteller should tell it.

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.

Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

But what's a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads-writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that's all.

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.