Salman Rushdie Quotes

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

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

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.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

The thing is, if people get it right away, I just don't think you're making art. I think you're making something they're comfortable with. You have to challenge people. You know, it has to be new. It has to be something they haven't seen before. Just bring them something they haven't seen before. They aren't going to love it right away because they haven't seen it before. So they have to take a minute, you know?

There is nothing new in art except talent.

The art world was not initially really accepting my kind of work. I was ahead of my time.

I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement - it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.

You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting.

But I think frustration is hilarious. One of my missions is to bring humor into fine art. It's sacred.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

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.

The artist is called a creator.

What makes a good work of art is something that honors certain traditions and breaks with others.

The joy of art is particularly sweet, though, because it carries with it the threat of rejection, of failure, and of missed connections. It's precisely the high-wire act of "this might not work" that makes original art worth doing.

I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don't have a prize for yet.

Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules.

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

You have to be at the forefront of culture to create art, which they call "product," and Hollywood is not. It's this very old business model, which I think is dying in a lot of ways.

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.

Poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare to do whatever they may approve of.

Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.

It is the death of present art when it returns again and again to the model. Use of the model is only an intermediate stage in artistic development. Create out of a living spirituality to overcome everything naturalistic.

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.