Salman Rushdie Quotes

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

Every story is different, so what is a detail in one might not be in something else. Diversity is something I embrace and love about my work.

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

Without poetry, stories would be told in sepia.

Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

A well-written novel, the most immersive of all forms of storytelling, should command your full attention and belief.

My mind has become somewhat like a book. What I mean by that is that when I look at the world, I see it as a story.

I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

I always had an interest in telling stories.

I've been into short stories ever since I read an Angela Carter collection when I was a teenager.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

Write your own stories.

Fiction is organized gossip.