Salman Rushdie Quotes

The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.

There's a lot of material from my life in my books, but they're not really autobiographical, in the sense that they're not about my life. So, in 'A Feather on the Breath of God' I write about my parents, I write about this Russian immigrant, I write about the world of dance, but it isn't an autobiography; so much is left out.

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.

I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.

One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.

I've been asked to write an autobiography, and I've started it a couple of times, on different angles, and maybe one day I will, but you know what? There's time for that because I'd like to have the whole story.

Memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off when dealing with discrete and poignant moments in a life, even harder when seeking to narrate over 80 years of existence.

I like autobiographies. I wouldn't mind making one of those.

Too many memoirs focus on childhoods and it's a bit turgid.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

By calling it a memoir, I meant is as a collection of memories. I thought it was (a more) artful (title) than documentary.

A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).

Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.

Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.

I write about my life, choosing incidents that I think will be, for one reason or another, significant to people. Often because they may have experienced the same things.

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.

I believe there's only one autobiography you can do.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

I wouldn't write anything autobiographical. If you've lived a life like Laurence of Arabia, it might be a consideration, but otherwise it's a little bit vain, it seems to me.

There may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography.