Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
Interpretation
Writing a novel can be as challenging and emotionally intense as giving birth.
In this quote, Salman Rushdie draws an analogy between the creative process of writing a novel and the physical and emotional experience of childbirth. He suggests that both endeavors involve a great deal of pain, sacrifice, and profound emotional investment, emphasizing the struggles that artists—particularly female novelists—face in their creative journeys. This comparison highlights the deeply personal and sometimes painful nature of artistic creation.
In practice
In a discussion about the challenges of creativity, one might quote Rushdie to highlight the struggles involved.
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.
Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.
I'm lucky enough to be able to make only movies I'm interested in seeing. That has to be an instinctive thrust. The audience knows when you're faking it. They can hang any kind of moniker they want on me.
One thing is for sure-none of the arts flourishes on censorship and repression. And by this time it should be evident that the American public is capable of doing its own censoring.
18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.
I'm playing deep African music.
I just want different narratives for people of color, especially women of color. I just want something that's different. I don't want us to be put in a box. I want it to be kind of a redefinition of who were are. If I can even achieve that in a tiny way, I'll be good. I'll be good.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.