A Quote by Salman Rushdie

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

Salman Rushdie

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Could Done Fiction Had Insult Islam Novel Rather Sentence Simply Than Trade Wanted Word Work Writing

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Salman Rushdie
Indian - Novelist
Born: June 19, 1947

You could say this word is better to use than that word, this sentence is good and that sentence isn't. But you don't determine the value of your work for other people.

Lynne Tillman

There's so much writing I could have done and so many ideas that I had and so many things I wanted to work on that I didn't. I like too much having things in my head rather than doing the work.

Sheila Heti

I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.

John Lanchester

I had never thought about writing a novel. But I had two young kids, and I realized that if I could write a novel, I could work at home.

Mary Kay Andrews

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.

Alain de Botton

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

Alain de Botton

I had wanted to write 'The Possessed' as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, 'No, you have to call this a memoir.'

Elif Batuman

I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.

Philip Roth

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

John Irving

I have a standing offer of $250,000 to anyone who can give any empirical evidence (scientific proof) for evolution. My $250,000 offer demonstrates that the hypothesis of evolution is nothing more than a religious belief.

Kent Hovind

A novel, basically, is writing one sentence — then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence.

Young-Ha Kim

America has been around less than 250 years, and in less than 250 years we have created what is the greatest country on earth. There are reasons for it. And any other country on earth could do the same thing. They could structure it the same way, and if they don't have natural resources they could economically structure a way to barter, share, buy, trade, you name it. They could do the same thing.

Rush Limbaugh

Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing; it's the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?

William Zinsser

The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank.

William Zinsser

What has bothered and angered radical Muslims is that I'm a non-Muslim writing anything at all about Islam. But this is fiction, and I don't think Islam is above criticism or fictionalization any more so than Judaism, Christianity, Mormonism or Hinduism is

Brad Thor

A Quote by Salman Rushdie

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