Literary Exile Quotes

Since it was announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has condemned my works and criticized them harshly. All of my works are now banned from getting into China or being published in China. What author would want to return to a country that banned his or her books?

Rushdie is a hostage.

In February of this year I returned to China to research my next book. The authorities know about the novels of mine that have been published in the west, including the latest one, Beijing Coma, about a student shot in Tiananmen Square, but so far have allowed me to return.

If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.

While I was writing 'Stick Out Your Tongue' in Beijing, the police began knocking on my door again. As soon as I finished the book, I moved to Hong Kong so that I could work undisturbed on my next novel.

My first book, 'Nadirs,' was very important for me. I'll leave its literary worth for others to judge. But its publication in Berlin in 1984 gave me protection. As did the awards it won. The Romanian secret police could no longer treat me and my friends as though we were completely cut off from the rest of the world. And we no longer felt cut off.

I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually.

When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, 'German literature is where I am.' It's really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it.

What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism.

In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.