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.
The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.
The more one studies the harmony of music, and then studies human nature, how people agree and how they disagree, how there is attraction and repulsion, the more one will see that it is all music.
Music is one of the most powerful things the world has to offer. No matter what race or religion or nationality or sexual orientation or gender that you are, it has the power to unite us.
You may choose your words like a connoisseur, _x000D_ And polish it up with art, _x000D_ But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays, _x000D_ Is the word that comes from the heart.
I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance.
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
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