Salman Rushdie Quotes

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

I used to be more of a purist about literature. I thought, 'If it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.'

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

There's certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there's also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.

I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it.

No one ever knows if a book is good until they read the book.

In 1935, Faber & Faber published an anthology entitled 'My Best Western Story' in which the genre's leading practitioners contributed what they considered their finest. Alas, literature the stories ain't; they appear more like fossils from a spent mine.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

Minor writers think style is all.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

There's no literary merit in my books.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose.

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.