INTERVIEW: Salman Rushdie: Writing Is My Way Of Responding To The World

In the interview, Rushdie talks about how he came to be in "Bridget Jones' Diary", how he dealt with fear and anger after he was sentenced to death in 1989, in Iran, over "The Satanic Verses" and about his relationship with his books.

Reporter: You've complained in some of your interviews that people care more about you as a person than about you as a writer but you choose to play your own part in different movies. You play yourself in different movies.

Salman Rushdie: Only once, actually. But I agree with you that that's a problem. I did it once in "Bridget Jones' Diary" and I did it because the author of the original book, Helen Fielding, is an old friend of mine and, basically she called me up and asked me to do it. In fact, I think her exact words were "How would you like to make a fool of yourself?". So I said OK. But I think, maybe that's funny once but it's not that funny six or seven times. I've actually made a rule out of that. I'm interested in movies and if people want to offer me little parts, then maybe I'll take them but playing myself … I think that's enough. No more of that.

Rep.: Your books have their own personality now that they've got so many awards, some of them stirred a lot of controversy. How do you relate to them now?

S.R.: Well, I'm just happy they are alive. Let's just say that some books quickly become inert and in a way they cease to have life in the world. I'm very pleased to have written books that have a life in the world and I would have wanted, when I started out as a writer, I would have liked to think that that would happen.

Rep.: How do you relate to "The Satanic Verses"?

S.R.: Truthfully, I think it's a book amongst my books and I think as well or badly about it as I do about all the other books. I don't particularly look back. I don't look back at my earlier work that much, I'm more interested in the next thing than the old things. So I'm happy that it's there, I can't imagine my work without it and I'm happy that now we've reached a moment in its life when the people who now pick it up, I think pick it up because they're interested to see what kind of a novel it is. So instead of people reading it to find out where the dirty bits are, it's finally allowed to be just like any other novel. People like it or people don't, and that's fine and that is the ordinary life of a book. So it finally has that after all these years.

Rep.: I heard you're going to have a part in the new Matrix

S.R.: It's not the Matrix. It's a film by the makers of the Matrix.

Rep.: Can you tell me more about this project?

S.R.: All I know is that they're making a film which is about Iraq, about contemporary Iraq. They have an idea for me to have a part in an element of the film, a kind of science fiction element where they imagine intellectuals in the future, you know, like a hundred years from now, looking back at the present and making a commentary on it. They have eight or nine people who will not play themselves but will play a future intellectual looking back at this almost as a historian and they want me to be one of those people.

Rep.: You had a very nice dialogue with Terry Gilliam and you said they're talking about screening "Haroun and the Sea of Stories".

S.R.: I've always said to Terry Gilliam that I would love him to make a film after one of my books and he's always not done it. I mean, he's a friend but I think that his films come out of his own imagination and I think he only really likes to make films that come out of his own imagination rather than adapting somebody else's work. So I respect that. Probably he will not make it. There is a project for making a film after "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" but it's not finalized yet and I don't want to say too much. There is a possibility it'll be made.

Rep.: You also write children's books and many writers choose to do that. Is it because it's kind of a literary exorcism?

S.R.: No, it's because you have children. It's very simple. I wrote these books because my children demanded them, in both cases. I remember my older son, who is now 30, when he was ten saying to me why didn't I write books that he could read and part of that ended up being "Haroun and the Sea of Stories". And now I have again a 12 year-old son and I wrote "Luka and the Fire of Life" for him.

I've now come to feel that many of the books for children that I most admire were written for specific children also. "Alice in Wonderland" is written for Alice Liddell, "Peter Pan" is written for five boys. You look around and you realize that many of the great classics in children's literature were written very specifically to please particular children and somehow, by doing that, managed to please many people. And some of these books have also achieved what I tried to achieve, which is to be written in a way in which grown-ups could read them differently.

"Alice in Wonderland" is a very grown-up book, it entertains very complex ideas about philosophy and morality and indeed about fiction and the nature of it, so it's much too grown-up for children and if children can read it and enjoy it their way and grown-ups can read it and enjoy it in their way and I wanted the same possibility .

Rep.: The names of these books that you wrote for your children are "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" and "Luka and the Fire of Life". If you were to write a story about yourself, it would be called "Salman and..."?

S.R.: Salman and I don't know what … "Salman and the Endless Book" (laughs). I have the sense of writing as being something continuous. It arrives in the world in the shape of this or that book but the process of writing is as a continuum. It's a thing that you always do. And for me, it's my way of responding to the world. If there's a thing in the world that disturbs me or interests me, or confuses me or whatever it might do, my way of dealing with it is to find a story to tell about it and through the telling of the story, to try and understand something about that. So, yes, "Salman and the Endless Book".

Rep.: You said in a interview in the '90s that you keep your hatred locked inside a trunk...

S.R.: That was to do with the period of the fatwa and my feeling is that in the same way that fear is a way of paralyzing you, anger also is a way of paralyzing you. And if you give into it, then the event or the people or whatever made you angry have won a victory really, because they have come to define you. So it seemed to me that the way to proceed and survive… I'm only human, I get angry. I was very determined not to become the creature of that event and, as a result, reactions like fear and anger were destructive to me, and so I had to find a way to put them in a box and lock them up.

Rep.: So your fear and anger are in the same trunk.

S.R.: Yes, yes, they're neighbors.

Rep.: Where do you keep the key?

S.R.: I threw it out. I threw away the trunk also. (laughs)

Rep.: You wrote "Fury" and you're a fan of the New York Yankees. What's your relationship with New York?

S.R.: I've always loved New York, long before I went there. I went to New York for the first time when I was very young, I was 24. My relationship is quite an old one. I've only had a place there for ten years now but I've had a relationship with the city for almost 40 years. I have very old friendships, I have quite a long narrative of my own in New York. As a young man, I always though this is a place where I would come and sit and see what happens to me and I felt, creatively, that it would be a good move. I had an instinct there was an attraction there. And then, for a long time, because of the years of the fatwa, it wasn't possible for me to make some choices and then, when it became possible again, I just thought I'm not getting any younger so if I'm ever going to do this, I should do it. So I did it and it's been very productive. One of the things people don't say about New York very often is that it's a town of very hard working people. People get up in the morning, go to work very early, stay at work very late and it's a real workaholic town. And, as a result, it's a very good city to work in because everyone around you is working very hard and in that climate it's easy to also be one of the people who work hard. And I love it that I write very well here.

Rep.: Are you working on a new book now?

S.R.: After finishing "Luka", I've been writing the screenplay for "Midnight's Children", which they're beginning to film next year. So that is now finished. Today I'm unemployed. I have to think about what the next project is.

Rep.: Are you thinking about signing with a different publishing house?

S.R.: No, I'm not thinking about it at all. My previous contract was signed in advance and in retrospect, I think I would have preferred not to sign a five-book deal, because your editors change and things like that, and you're just stuck there. So now I think I don't need to do that. I'll just write the book and then see about who's publishing it.

Rep: Your work is about East and West. How did this relationship evolve in your work? Where are you now?

S.R.: It just goes back and forth. There were moments in my life when I thought maybe I've written too much about India and should write about something else, and then, the next book I think of has a very strong Indian component. I think it will always be a kind of journey back and forth for me. I do think there are things I want to write about which are purely western and have nothing to do with India and I do have two such ideas right now. But India has been an enormous inspiration to me and I go back all the time and I never know what's going to happen to me. But usually, when I go to India I come back full of stories. The answer is I quite like having the two possibilities, sometimes the west, sometimes the east. Usually, the two encounter each other somehow

Rep.: Last year, Aravind Adiga got the Booker prize for "The White Tiger" and he also talks about the east in his books. Is the East very appealing in terms of marketing, in terms of selling a book?

S.R.: Truthfully, I never think about marketing. It's of no interest to me. I'm lucky in that, at an early age, I acquired quite a wide readership. I never expected it, I always thought that my kind of writing might have quite a smaller readership, so I was wonderfully surprised to discover that it actually had a wide readership, which made it possible for me to be financially independent as a writer. So now I'm in the position of not having to think about selling a book. I just write it, it's somebody else's job to sell it.

Rep.: You have very impressive public readings, I hear...

S.R.: I think some writers can read and some writers can't. I think it's because a little bit lf me is a frustrated actor. These days, the only performances I can give are of my own books.

Rep.: Do you read to your family while you're writing a book?

S.R.: No, no. I don't show it while I'm writing it. Actually, that's not completely true. I usually don't show it, but I did show early parts of "Luka" and "Haroun" to my two sons because I wanted to make sure that I was on the right track. If they had said, no, I don't like the story, then I would have been very upset, but I would have to think again. In the case of "Luka", I showed the first two, three chapters. One thing I was worried about was that one of the characters in "Luka" was kind of a villain and he's quite scary, and I think children like to be scared, but they like to be scared in a good way, not in a disturbing way. I wasn't sure if I was on the right side of that line, so I gave it to my son to read and I didn't tell him anything. To my enormous surprise, the character that I was worried about turned out to be his favorite character. That showed me something. It showed me that, first, I was on the right side of the line, and secondly, that he clearly is a child who quite likes dark material.

Rep.: What are you expecting to see in Romania?

S.R.: Nothing. I think the way to travel is just to put yourself in the place. It doesn't work if you have expectations. I like going tabula rasa and just see what happens.

Born in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1947, Rushdie left India for England at age 13 and was schooled at the prestigious King's College in Cambridge. After graduation, he moved to Karachi, Pakistan, and returned to Britain to become a full-time writer after a brief job in television.

Rushdie made his literary debut in 1975, with "Grimus", but the novel that brought him world fame was 1981's "Midnight's Children", which received the Booker prize in 1981 and the Booker of Bookers in 1993.

After "Midnight's Children" came "Shame" (1983), "The Satanic Verses" (1988), which brought him a death sentence in Iran, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories " (1990), "The Moor's Last Sigh" (1995),"The Ground Beneath Her Feet" (1999), "Fury" (2001) and "Shalimar the Clown" (2005), all translated in Romanian and published in Romania by Polirom.

Rushdie is on a three-day visit to Romania, promoting "The Enchantress of Florence", whose Romanian translation has been released by Polirom.

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