Daily Inspiration Quote by Salman Rushdie

"Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours"

Salman Rushdie, Novelist

About this Quote

Rushdie’s line is a polite slap at the most fashionable kind of reading: the version that treats a novel as raw material for the reader’s autobiography. “Go to the author” isn’t a plea for worship or for some locked-box “correct” interpretation. It’s a demand for intellectual hygiene. A book is not a mirror you hold up to yourself; it’s a crafted object built out of choices - voice, structure, allusion, omission - and those choices point outward to an intention, a set of pressures and risks that belonged to a particular mind at a particular moment.

The subtext is personal. Rushdie’s career sits inside the culture war over authorial intent in the most literal way: his work has been fought over, misread on purpose, and treated as evidence in arguments that were never about literature. When interpretation becomes a projection machine, bad faith can dress itself up as “my truth.” His warning is also aimed at the softer version of that habit: the social-media era’s “I didn’t like it, therefore it failed,” where feeling replaces attention.

What makes the sentence work is its quiet asymmetry. “His meaning” is singular; “yours” is possessive and slippery. Rushdie is reminding us that reading is an encounter with otherness, not a scavenger hunt for validation. The ethical ask is modest but real: suspend the reflex to colonize a text with your own agenda long enough to hear the intelligence you’re borrowing. That’s not anti-reader; it’s pro-literature.

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About the Author

Salman Rushdie (born June 19, 1947) is a Novelist from India.

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