Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
Interpretation
Censorship restricts creativity and expression, preventing writers from discussing important topics freely.
In this quote, Salman Rushdie expresses the viewpoint that censorship acts as a barrier to creativity and personal expression for writers. Instead of allowing them to explore and discuss their thoughts and ideas openly, censorship limits their ability to communicate, ultimately hindering the artistic and intellectual discourse that is vital for society.
In practice
A speaker at a literary event discussing the impact of censorship on creativity.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.
I don't think punk fashion is a specter or overemphasized - it made a big impression, as there had never been anything like it before.
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.
Art is what we do when we're truly alive.
Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.
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