Salman Rushdie Quotes

A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

I'm a happy camper when I'm doing both: writing and art every day, along with a dose of reading and adventures into what else is being done by other artists/writers and poets. Like breathing. I've written poems or fictions to go with a painting. The source for the inspiration of the art often eludes me.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Great theatre is about challenging how we think and encouraging us to fantasize about a world we aspire to.

There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

I love the feeling of creating pictures in someone's mind just by spelling out the right lyrical combination.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

Art is about the edges and the sharp corners and those places are not conducive to activism, which is about putting on a gloss.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.