Salman Rushdie Quotes

What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.

I think that just the nature of art education in schools, it's about packs, you know? Like, we're young wolves running together, creating a consensus. And consensus is antithetical to the art process.

You cannot play for safety and make art.

Each single gesture of art must be daring. One must not be concerned with the side-effects.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

I think if you don't risk something in art, it's not really important.

I can't think of anything outside of having the gift yourself and creating yourself. I can't think of the next better thing to do than being able to put it back. Creative expression, I think, is vital to the success of any society.... A society without art will die.

All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.

We're all trying to be artists making our own unique statements. I think the only real way to do that is through failure.

I think that other people covering my work is really exciting... Im really open to that kind of thing because I think interpretation is an art form.

I would advise puppeteering for any artist. It's a way to break down pretensions. It's a sculpture that can talk. It's a painting that can talk. And it's pure play. I think every artist needs to stay in touch with the idea of playing. The artist should always be playing, always. All art is performance.

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.

In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

We started to confuse entertainment with art, because art has a component of entertainment. It has to have that or it becomes too boring. It becomes too lost in its own devices. But I just think that we started to lose, and even before that, it's not necessary.

Rhianna don't want you to give her what you think that she wants. She needs you to give her something that's fresh. So you have to bend your voice and bend your personality and bend the music to make sure it sounds like it's new to everybody.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. ...Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. ...Art is Individualism.

It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.

You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen. When you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things.

I think that a lot of artists have succeeded in making what I might call "curator's art." Everybody's being accepted, and I always want to say, "Really? That's what you've come for? To make art that looks a lot like somebody else's art?" If I am thinking of somebody else's art in front of your art, that's a problem.

Artists everywhere steal mercilessly all the time and I think this is healthy.

In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.

I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.

Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.

A good poem has its own life. It's like bringing a child into the world. You, the poet, birthed the child, but the child will surprise you continually. I think a work of art has its own aliveness, its own future.