Salman Rushdie presents the 2025 Phillips Lecture at The New School
In March, acclaimed author Salman Rushdie visited The New School to deliver the 2025 William Phillips lecture, a talk titled “Blasphemy Is a Victimless Crime.” Rushdie, the author of 15 novels, including the Booker Prize–winning Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, and nonfiction books including, most recently, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, spoke about freedom of thought and speech, the rising politicization of religion, and blasphemy as a form of resistance. Following the lecture, Rushdie chatted with New School creative writing professor Luis Jaramillo, and responded to audience questions read out by Christopher Cox, executive dean of Eugene Lang College. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Salman Rushdie: The reason for the title of this talk is that in the difficult period of my life after the attack on The Satanic Verses began, a reader who I didn’t know, who was clearly a fan, sent me in the mail a T-shirt, and on the front of the T-shirt it said, “Blasphemy is a victimless crime.” And I guess what he meant is that where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy. Because if there is no God, there’s nobody to blaspheme against, which is a point of view that I had a lot of sympathy with.
I’ve never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. Religion, unfortunately, had a different idea. Another thing it was wrong about. I grew up in a household in what was then called Bombay, in India, which was very largely secularized. And I think one of the reasons for that is that my parents’ generation had gone through the very tough moment of the independence and partition of India and Pakistan, a time in which a very large number of people were massacred, Hindus by Muslims, Muslims by Hindus, a very bloody birth. And it’s impossible even to know how many people [died]—the official figures say something like a million, but the real figures might well be two million or more people. And I think what happened to my father and mother—who were from a Muslim background, but they didn’t want to go to Pakistan, they felt more Indian than Muslim—I think after that, after this very bloody birth, they didn’t really want much to do with religion. The extent to which there was religion in my family is that my mother didn’t believe in eating anything that came from a pig. No pigs. That was Islam for us.
When I went to boarding school in England, I decided to rebel, and I went to the school shop, and I bought a ham sandwich. This is a very important ham sandwich. It wasn’t very good, but it felt extraordinary to eat it at the age of 13 and a half, to eat the forbidden flesh of the swine. And nothing happened. There was no thunderbolt, and I understood at that point that God did not exist. This was the lesson of the ham sandwich. Also, I think when I was at college in the mid-sixties, religion really wasn’t a subject. I mean, I was 21 in 1968, I was 20 in the Summer of Love. There were other things on our minds. And of course, it was also a very political moment. It was the moment of the protests against the Vietnam War. It was the moment of first-generation feminism; it was the moment of the Civil Rights Movement. There was a lot that we had to argue about and talk about. What we didn’t talk about was religion. That seemed to be marginal to the conversation. And one of the great surprises of my life is the way in which it has moved back into the center of the conversation.
Not only Islam. Christianity in this country and Hinduism in India have all become, to a large extent, politicized—and needing to be reckoned with. And blasphemy has always been the technique that religion has used to exert control over what is possible to say and what is possible to think. I’m doing something regarding Voltaire, and so I’ve been reading him and the Enlightenment writers. Voltaire, of course, was a serious enemy of the Church and believed the Church rather than the state to be the greatest oppressor of thought. His famous phrase is ecrasez l’infâme—crush the infamous thing—the infamous thing being the Catholic Church.
The Enlightenment writers basically did believe that the enemy was the Church, not the state. And in order to create the thing that we came to understand as freedom of speech, it was necessary to break the power of the Church over what could be said, not the power of the state. The writer François Rabelais, who was attacked by the Church, was defended by the state, and he was defended on the basis of his genius. So anyway, out of that Enlightenment period, observed and absorbed by Thomas Paine, came the American idea of liberty and freedom. So it all comes from an intellectual desire to break the power of other forces to limit thought. And the tool used for this was blasphemy. Rather interestingly, a few years ago I went to a literary festival in Cartagena, in Colombia. Apart from being a beautiful old city, Cartagena was also one of the great centers of the slave trade and a place in which the Spanish Inquisition was very powerful. And to this day in Cartagena, there is now a museum of the Inquisition, which, if you go and see it, is eerie because it contains instruments of torture: scaffolds, racks, thumbscrews. There they all are with little signs telling you what they were for. And I was shown this by one of the executives of the museum, who told me how important they were. He was kind of pro-torture. He said it was really important that these methods existed in order to keep the Church successful and established. It is maybe the only museum in the world which is in favor of the torture of people, as was the Catholic Church for a long time. So blasphemy has been used in that way and is still used in that way in certain parts of the world.
I’ll just talk for a little bit about my own experience. I was living in England at the time of the fuss about The Satanic Verses. Earlier than that, the last successful prosecution for blasphemy in the United Kingdom was in 1976. In a magazine called Gay News, the poet James Kirkup wrote a poem about the crucifixion of Christ, imagining a gay centurion at the foot of the cross, fantasizing about the body of Christ. Quite powerful and not at all restrained, this poem. And it was attacked. There was a campaigner in England called Mary Whitehouse who used to campaign against what she considered to be moral evils, especially anything involving sex, and she was given permission to bring a private prosecution against Gay News for its publication of this poem. And they were found guilty. The verdict was reversed later, but it was the last time in England in British law that the crime of blasphemy was found to have been committed.
When the attack on The Satanic Verses began, the people attacking the book in the UK used the Kirkus case to say that I should be prosecuted and found guilty in the same way. And the only reason that I was not found guilty, given that the law was still on the statute book, is that the law only protected the Church of England. Kind of unfair, right? Which is what they pointed out. But the solution to the problem was not to extend the law, which is what was being asked for, but to diminish the law. It took a few years doing, but eventually in the UK, the law of blasphemy was abolished and has remained so. And many countries of the world no longer have such a law.
But there is the thing coming back into fashion, which is blasphemy creeping in through a back door, which is now it’s supposed to be wrong to upset people. If somebody feels upset, they have the right to try and prevent you from saying what you want to say, which is actually exactly the same as the kind of democratization of blasphemy. Anybody can be the pope.
And I recommend to anybody out there, young people who might think that offendedness is a virtue: Don’t be the pope. We’ve got one, and that’s enough.
Luis Jaramillo: It’s interesting that you said that you’re not a writer about religion, but maybe all your books feature religion quite prominently. Is that true?
Rushdie: I don’t know, I forget. I don’t think The Ground Beneath Her Feet—there’s just rock and roll.
Jaramillo: Well, that’s its own religion, I suppose.
Rushdie: I think the problem is if you come from a world as I did, of South Asia, you may not be religious, but everyone else is. So if you try to write about that world, you have to deal with it, because otherwise your characters don’t make sense. You have to be able to write about people who think in a way that you don’t think. Religion creeps in just because of where I’ve lived. When I wrote The Satanic Verses, I thought I was writing a novel about London. I’d written a novel about largely about India, which was Midnight’s Children; a novel which was largely about Pakistan, which was Shame. And I thought now I should write about the place that I came to, instead of the places that I came from. So the idea was to write a London novel. Of course, one of the things about London is that there’s an immigrant South Asian community there, and so the novels took place in that community, and these dream sequences were very secondary in my thinking to what the book was about. But of course, the people who attacked the book took the trouble not to read it. One mullah was asked on British television if he’d read my work, and he said, “I don’t have to wade in the gutter to know that it contains filth.” Which is an excellent point of view about gutters.
I used to be quite upset about the fact that people who were angry about my book had not read it. Then I thought that it’s not the first time: People who accused James Joyce of pornography had clearly never read James Joyce, because whatever talents he may have, arousing sexual desire is probably not one of them. When people accused Lolita of being in favor of pedophilia, they obviously hadn’t read this incredibly moral book in which even the pedophile constantly tells you, the reader, how evil he is. So I thought maybe it’s a necessary thing in order to attack a book that you don’t read it. Because if you read it, maybe you have a more complicated point of view. And in order to attack somebody for blasphemy, you have to have a simple point of view: “Bad.” And so I have written about religion and my share of it, but it has really been a response to the subject matter that life gave me. I don’t spend my life thinking about religion hardly at all, except when it gets in the way, which is quite often.
Jaramillo: Often in the books, there’s a battle between believers and nonbelievers, or one kind of sect and another kind of sect, and then these conflicts form the backbone of some of the books.
Rushdie: I think morals are a big subject for the novel. Ethics, good and evil, right action, wrong action. How are we to behave in the world? And of course, one of the reasons that religions exist is to answer those questions. It seems to me that the there are two reasons why we made these religions. One is to answer the question of origins: How do we get here? How did here get here? And the other is the question of ethics: Now that we are here, how shall we live? And that’s what religions try to answer, both those questions. And on the subject of the question of origins, they’re all wrong. I mean, they might be beautiful. The supreme being who creates everything in six days, that has to rest on the seventh day because he’s out of breath. It’s a good story. The idea of the god Indra churning the universe into being in a giant churn. Nice story. Not true, but nice. I think now we don’t need to look to religion to answer the question of origins. And I certainly don’t find myself looking in the direction of priests of any stripe to answer the question of morals, discussed with reference to the Catholic Church and its use of children. For me, those two big issues are no longer answered by religion, but they’re still an enormous subject for literature. So I go there.
Jaramillo: At the beginning of Victory City, there’s something like an incantation. It sounds like an epic poem. What’s your thought about the muse? Is there a muse if there’s no God? Is there some other thing that animates us as creative people?
Rushdie: I mean, it comes from somewhere, art. And I’m not allowed to tell you where that is. That’s a secret. You get these people who come up to you and say, “Where do you get your ideas?” And I say, “Well, there’s a shop, but I’m not allowed to tell you the location.” Of course, very often in the act of writing, you have that feeling of something being written through you rather than by you. And I don’t know what that means. It doesn’t happen every day, but when it does happen, you think, Oh, how did I write that? You find yourself writing sentences that you have never thought of. Having people express opinions, which you have never had. Now, I guess this is the magic of Magic Realism, that there is a magic in art. It’s not just literary art, it’s also visual art. Also music.
Talk to composers. They will often tell you that the music comes to a player, and they don’t know where it came from. I was listening to Paul McCartney talking about “Yesterday.” He said he woke up in the morning and he had this tune in his head, and he initially thought, if he has this tune, it must be somebody else’s tune that he’s remembering, so he writes it down and only gradually begins to understand that he just thought of that. And then he didn’t know what the words were. It wasn’t called “Yesterday.” It was called “Scrambled Egg”: “Scrambled egg. Oh my darling, how I love your legs.” Really. He wrote the words down just to be in the right rhythm. And gradually it became “Yesterday.”
Even stranger is the story of Keith Richards. Why is Keith Richards alive? That’s one of the great mysteries of life. Anyway, Keith Richards in his earlier, more self-destructive mode, passed out in a hotel room, wakes up in the middle of the night—always has a little tape recorder by his bedside—and plays something into the tape recorder, passes out, wakes up in the morning, has no idea what he’s done, presses play, and out comes the “Satisfaction” riff. He didn’t even know he’d done it. Art is a mystery, and thank goodness it is. If it wasn’t a mystery, it would just be ordinary.
Jaramillo: One of the mysteries in your books is the idea of prophecy. There are a lot of prophets and people predict things, but then also your books have also predicted things in your own life in strange and violent ways.
Rushdie: Yeah, I’m tired of these things coming true. I wish they’d stop. It’s worrying. But I don’t consider myself to have any prophetic vision. Now, I’ve had a little trouble with prophets in my lifetime; I’m not applying for the job. Again, it’s this thing that what a book does at its best is provide a vision of the world that the reader accepts. And sometimes it’s a little ahead of the curve. Sometimes the vision of the world that it sees comes into being little later, good or bad. I think it would not have been impossible to predict what’s happening in America now, if you were paying attention. And yet, if you read the book by Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here—well, ironic title. I think a lot of writing is just about intensely paying attention. And if you do that, sometimes you see things before other people see them, and then it looks like, “How do you know that?” I know that because I was paying attention.
Jaramillo: The Satanic Verses is about a lot of things, including, as in other books of yours like The Ground Beneath Her Feet, fame. So—fame. Talk about fame.
Rushdie: I’m against it.
Jaramillo: It’s very difficult to write. Maybe not for you, but for most of us, and there are countless excuses we can give ourselves, but to me it seems like fame is maybe a valid one.
Rushdie: As an excuse for not for writing?
Jaramillo: Yeah. Could you talk about that?
Rushdie: Well, if I was famous enough, I would certainly stop, but I’m still trying. No, look, The Ground Beneath Her Feet came out of the idea that … You know, I was growing up in India and listening every Sunday to Western pop music. I was listening to Elvis and my mother didn’t like Elvis and wanted me to listen to Pat Boone, but the definition of rock and roll is that your mother didn’t like it. And she didn’t like it, but I did. And then I remember years later, I met a Chinese writer, who was my age, and he said how in the late fifties, early sixties, they would sometimes on radio be able to hear Western classical music and opera, and they couldn’t make head or tail of it. Then they listened to Buddy Holly or Elvis, and they understood it completely. And so I thought, Here is the first genuinely global artistic phenomenon, and that it came into being at a time when there were no global media, much harder for information to travel across the world in the year of “Rock Around the Clock,” 1956. Now, everybody knows everything in five seconds. But then, even in that time when it was so hard for things to move, everyone in the world understood what rock and roll was. It was what your mother didn’t like. And everybody’s mother in the world was the same. I thought, That’s an interesting phenomenon. And then I was trying to write this book, which would in some way unite the three worlds that have been mine: India and England and America. And I thought, This is the only thing that can encompass all three. And so that’s why it became a rock and roll novel.
And then it had the most strange afterlife. I sent it to a few friends of mine who were musicians, and I said, “Just read it to tell me where the mistakes are so that I could fix it.” And one of the people I sent it to was—you won’t have heard of him, the lead singer of U2. And he called me up and he said, “You know, your novel there, I started reading it. I was reading it like your policeman, trying to keep you out of trouble. And then I discovered I liked it.” He said, “There’s a song in there”—because the novel has an imaginary songwriter, and one of his imaginary lyrics is [from] a song called “The Ground Beneath Her Feet.” And Bono said, “Yes, you know you’ve got your title track.” And I said, “I didn’t know novels had title tracks.” But he said, “Well, I’ve written a tune.” And then I had to go to Dublin because he wouldn’t send it to me, and I had to sit in his car. Now the sound system in Bono’s car is not like the sound system in your car. If you open the trunk, it’s all sound system. He played it to me, and he made me listen to it three times before I was allowed to speak. And then I said, “Yeah, I like it.” And then he played it to the rest of the band, and then they recorded it, and then it’s on a U2 album. I would go to concerts, and they would play my song, and I was on stage with them.
Jaramillo: That sounds like fame.
Rushdie: It’s my 15 minutes. But one of the very strange things—you will maybe not know this yet, when you become rock stars, you will know this: When you’re on the stage of Wembley Stadium, and there’s 100,000 people there, everybody cheers at the same time, but because the stadium’s so big, the sound reaches you in waves. So even though they’re all yelling at the same time, you get woomp, woomp, woomp. And I think, How do you know when to talk? Do you talk over it? Do you wait for the third wave? How do you know when to sing? And I thought, These guys do it every night. I just couldn’t do what they do. But it was a very interesting discovery, that just the physical fact of being in a place with so many people kind of changes the rules.
Bigger than most book readings. You don’t get that sort of triple wave in a book reading.
Jaramillo: I have a question about how you think about storytelling. Here’s an example. I really love the storyline in The Satanic Verses when the young woman Ayesha convinces a village to walk to the Arabian Sea, which she says will part and they can go to Mecca. People are reluctant to do this, but some of them jump onboard right away and then they walk. There’s a lot of beauty in the descriptions too. She has butterflies all around her. At one point the butterflies come and save the group, and then here’s a little spoiler: Things don’t end so well.
Rushdie: What can I tell you? It’s a true story. I mean, there was a news story. In my novel, it happens in India, but in the real world, there was somebody in Pakistan who believed that they had seen a vision, and it was not a girl, it was a man, and it was a Shia Muslim, and he believed that he had seen this vision that they would walk to the sea and the water would part, and they would walk across the sea to the Shia holy site of Karbala. They all drowned, except for a few who didn’t drown, who managed to survive. When they were in the hospital and interviewed, they all said that they had seen the miracle. They all said that “we were not worthy to be taken, but the others all went.” And when people said to them, “No, we can show you their bodies, they drowned,” the people would say, “You can show us anything you like, but we saw what we saw.” I thought, You can’t make it up, as they say. Sometimes what the world gives you is a story. Butterflies, I made up.
Jaramillo: I’m thinking about how you construct that. Even if it’s a true story, what’s your impulse when you’re making something up?
Rushdie: Well, you were saying about religion, I was trying to create a vision of people who believe that deeply in something that it overrides all science and logic and observable fact. That story showed up and I thought, That’s it. And when the story is as powerful as that, you tell it as simply as you can. Don’t overdo. It doesn’t need overdoing. It’s powerful enough as it is. Don’t get in the way. One of the good things to learn as a young writer is how to stay out of the way of your story: not do too much, do what it needs. And so I’ve always thought that form is dictated by story.
There are books that I’ve written in which the language has been very ornate, and there are books I’ve written in which the language has been very plain, and it’s entirely dictated by the nature of the story I’m trying to tell. When I’m writing the Enchantress of Florence and I’m moving between the Mughal court and Renaissance Florence, the kinds of thing that those guys were reading were very ornate, fabulous fictions. It was “Orlando Furioso” and stuff like that. And I thought, I want to write a book that sounds like the kind of book that the people in the story would read, and it became very flowery on purpose. But when I wrote this memoir last year about the attack on me, I thought, Tell this simply. Don’t decorate it, just tell it straight. So the thing you’re trying to tell dictates how you tell it.
Jaramillo: Yeah, that book is written very simply. You don’t name your attacker in the book and you give the letter A to stand for him. But there’s one paragraph that’s very alliterative, and it stands out in the book because it’s such a different kind of language than the rest of the book. But there are lots of other places in your writing where you do a paragraph full of alliteration, or other kinds of wordplay, rhyming. When does that emerge in your writing and why?
Rushdie: I think I’m just by nature quite playful. I like to play games on the page, and why not? If you don’t like it, go play another game. But these are my games, and a lot of the writers that I love are also playful. Nabokov is playful. Borges is extremely playful. Calvino is playful.
I just think play is one of the ways in which you invent the world. It’s one of the ways in which I invent the world. And I mean, if I do it right, then it’s enjoyable for the reader as well as for me. So the only question is, Did I do it right? There’s no right or wrong in writing. There’s only, does it work, or does it not work? And you try and find that out before you publish it. Sometimes you only find out after you publish it, and then it’s too late.
Jaramillo: Well, that’s a question then: What’s your editing process like?
Rushdie: It’s changed a lot. I mean, when I was young and starting out, I needed to have really detailed architecture—structure—before I could start putting flesh on the skeleton. Also, I wrote quite quickly, but it needed a lot of revision. Also, I was really bad at taking editorial advice. I would get on my high horse and say, “Whose book is this, is it your book? Whose name is on the cover? My name.” Bad behavior. All that has changed. Now I write much more slowly, but it needs much less revision. And I don’t need the architecture so much. I need some general architecture. But the way I’ve thought about it is that the symphony is a very structured form. Jazz is not. And the Indian form—classical form—the raag also has a structure but leaves enormous room for the player to improvise. And I think now of myself as somewhere in the jazz slash raag direction, not symphonic.
I like it. It’s freer. Writing becomes discovery. You discover what you’re writing by writing it. I mean, if Miles Davis stood up to blow, he probably didn’t know exactly what was coming out of his trumpet until it came out. And that’s kind of beautiful. Ravi Shankar playing the rain raag— probably different each time he plays it.
And the other thing is I’ve got much better at accepting editorial advice. My view now is I’ll take all the help I can get. And I’ve been very lucky in my editors. I’ve worked with some really great editors. I worked with Bob Gottlieb at Knopf. I worked with Susan Kamil at Random House. I’m now working with Andy Ward at Random House, who’s really a wonderful editor. And what all great editors will do is they’ll tell you where there’s a problem, but they won’t tell you the solution.
Jaramillo: They can’t.
Rushdie: Well, they think they can sometimes. There are editors who think they can. But to say, “You lost my attention here, and then you’ve got it back over here. So what’s happening here? Is there something you can fix?” That kind of thing. To give you just one slightly macabre example, when I showed Andy Ward the first draft of Knife, he said, “There are very few people who come that close to death and come back from it.” He said, “Tell us what that’s like.” Because I hadn’t really. He said, “Just tell us what that is like.” So I put that in. I’ll tell you what it’s not like: no tunnel of light, no heavenly choirs, nothing. Just pain, and blood, and the awareness that you’re dying. That’s it. It’s not very exciting. It reinforced me in my blasphemous position that there’s nothing else.
Jaramillo: It would’ve been interesting if it had changed you significantly.
Rushdie: No, the other thing that happened: Everybody said, “You survived, and it was a miracle. So now do you believe in miracles?” No. I believe in medical science. That’s what saved my life. I believe in the skill of the surgeons who operated on me. I don’t think any kind of heavenly hand reached down to protect me, because whatever that heavenly hand is probably knows that I’m not on that team. So, no, it didn’t change my view about that.
Jaramillo: In many of your books, you write about unexpected and transformative love. In a way, Knife is about that too—it’s kind of like a love letter to your wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. But in Knife, you also write about a short story that you started about a perfectly happy person, Henry White. How do you write about love and make it narratively interesting?
Rushdie: Yeah, it’s not easy unless you really mean it.
And if you really mean it, it tells you how to do it. I also thought there’s something that I liked about a book that everybody thought would be about violence and hatred and death, and to turn it into a love story. And to let the love be the antidote to the hate. Because when I started thinking about that book, I thought, I can tell the story of what happened in 15 pages. That’s not a book, that’s an article. So, if there’s a book, what is the book? In the end, I came to think of the shape of the book as a triangle of which I was at one point, and at the other two points were my wife, Eliza, and the guy who tried to kill me—representing, if you like, love and hate, life and death. All the while that I was writing the book, I had this shape in my mind, and I thought, Okay, that’s a book I can write. That’s about something. And so the love story is very important because it’s about choosing life rather than death, choosing the world of life—and love is at the center of that—over the world of murder, which is connected to hatred, et cetera. So then I thought, Okay, that’s a book worth writing.
Jaramillo: Have other books had a shape like that, a very distinct kind of geometric shape or other kind shape?
Rushdie: One of the problems about having written a lot of books is that you don’t remember. Let me think about that. No, not in that way. Not in that way, where there is a very clear geometrical form. I mentioned The Enchantress of Florence, which goes back and forth from India in the sixteenth-century to Italy, at a similar time, 50 years difference. And I worried about the shape because I thought people are going to get annoyed that you’re telling one story and suddenly you jump halfway across the world and tell a different story. I asked a few friends to read it, saying, “Tell me when it irritates you,” and I was right. It irritated them. The solution to the problem was that I understood I was doing it too much, and instead to write the book in longer sections and to give each section its own little arc, so it felt like you were reading a satisfying story in each thing. Then it becomes less irritating. There I really had to think about the shape in a different way.
Jaramillo: Talking about advice, you’ve met and been friends with many acclaimed writers. I’m curious about three in particular: E. M. Forster, Gabriel García Márquez, and Bruce Chatwin. But you can talk about anyone you want. I’m thinking about the difference between things that you learn from someone’s work and things that you learn from them when you meet them in person.
Rushdie: Well, Forster, I was lucky. I was at King’s College Cambridge, and he was a fellow of the college. I was 19 and he was 91. He died about less than two years after I graduated. But the thing about him is that he was very accessible. He liked to interact with students. He would come and sit down in the little students’ bar area and just sit there with a little drink. And he liked it if you went up and said hello. But of course everybody was thinking, “That’s E. M. Forster. You can‘t.”And they’d be too scared.
I got lost when I was first at Cambridge. I went to the wrong place for a meeting with a professor, and I walked into his room by mistake. He said, “Who are you?” I told him who I was, and then he said, “Oh, you’re from India?” And I said yes. Of course, India was so important to him, and his rooms were full of Indian things. And then he became friendly. I didn’t get to know him very well, but a few times I had conversations with him, and I just felt lucky to touch the hem of his garment, because I enormously admire Passage to India, written by a gay writer at a time when homosexuality was illegal, an anti-imperialist novel at a time when it was not fashionable to be anti-imperialist in England. A very brave book to write. Savage about the British. I read it again, not so long ago, and I couldn’t believe how rude it was. I mean, quite true, but rude.
And then one of the things that helped me was to understand that I was the opposite of him. That’s to say the whole Forsterian thing—the prose, the tone, everything—it’s very cool. It’s a cool, collected, civilized tone. And one of the things that India is not is cool. India is hot, and it’s not simple. It’s crowded and overwhelming and too much. All the opposite of Forsterian writing. I thought, How do I write the opposite of this? How do I write a book that’s hot and crowded and odorous and too much? And that became Midnight’s Children. He really helped me by showing me how to do the opposite.
García Márquez, I never met. I had a phone conversation with him because I was in Mexico City, and I was having dinner with, amongst other people, Carlos Fuentes, who was a friend of mine. And Carlos said, “It’s crazy that of all the writers of the world, the two of you have never met.” And I said, “Well, doesn’t he live here in Mexico City?” And Carlos said, “Yeah, but he’s in Havana. He’s with Fidel, his buddy Fidel.” And Carlos got off the dining table and went into another room, then came back a few minutes later, and said, “There’s somebody on the phone for you. You got to go talk to them.” And he’d called Gabo in Havana and said, “There’s somebody here you’ve got to talk to.” And we found ourselves on the phone with each other. And it was kind of a strange conversation because my Spanish is not very good. I mean, I understand some, but you wouldn’t want to hear me speak it. He pretended that he didn’t speak English, which was bullshit, because he understood certainly most of it. And then we discovered we had about the same level of bad French.
We had this conversation in three languages, and, in my memory of the conversation, there’s no language problem. We’re just talking to each other. He said to me something which I will now boast about because I boast about it every chance I get. He said, “At my age, I don’t any longer read much outside the Spanish language. But there are two writers in English who I want to know what they’re doing. One is J. M. Coetzee, and the other is you.” I thought, Take that to the bank. And here I am, still boasting. But that’s the only time I ever talked to him.
Bruce Chatwin,, what can I tell you? Bruce knew everything about everything. It was really annoying. I was traveling with him in the desert in Australia when he was researching what became The Songlines. We were in this little car driving in the desert, and he just talked nonstop. At one point I said, “Bruce, do you ever stop talking?” And he got very upset. As well as knowing everything about everything, he knew everyone. If you wanted the queen’s unlisted cell phone number, you would ask Bruce Chatwin, and he’d say, “Oh yeah, I’ve got it here.” He had all these famous little black Moleskine notebooks with tiny, beautiful handwriting, full of everybody’s phone number and everything else that he wanted to make a note of. He was the most fascinating person.
We were traveling around the desert for some weeks, and we were sharing hotel rooms, and he never hit on me, for which I’m grateful. I say this because he was somebody who put his life in compartments, and his gay world never interacted with his straight world. When he died and we all went to the memorial event, there were all these groups of people and we were all looking at each other saying, “Why are you here?” It was because he had just completely compartmentalized his life. That was quite strange. I think also he was really scared of AIDS, and he didn’t want anybody to mention the word in his presence. He kept saying that he had been infected by a rare Chinese fungus when he’d been traveling in China, and we all had to talk about the damn Chinese fungus when it was obvious what was actually happening. That was very sad at the end. He was in that moment of the horror of the AIDS epidemic, when we lost so many people. And we lost him just as, I think, he was coming into his own as a writer. I think he would’ve written a lot more, and I just felt he was getting better all the time. That’s a sadness, when a writer is cut off mid-sentence, and that’s what happened to Bruce.
Jaramillo: Your assailant used the word “disingenuous” to describe you. It’s such an interesting word to describe a fiction writer, in particular.
Rushdie: Well, especially a fiction writer whose work you haven’t read.
Jaramillo: Right. You looked disingenuous.
Rushdie: I’d rather like to be disingenuous. I thought, Okay, yeah, and? What’s your point?
Jaramillo: You also write that if you wrote in a novel that somebody wanted to kill somebody else because they were disingenuous, no one would buy it.
Rushdie: No. He basically said, in his own words, that he’d read two pages of something I’d written. He didn’t say which two pages. Must’ve been good, right? On the basis of those two pages, and this is somebody who was not a hardened criminal, he’s somebody with no criminal record, to go from zero to murder, that’s quite a jump. And to do that on so little evidence—I thought it was very strange. I thought if I wrote that as a character in a book, my editor would say, “Not enough motivation.” I think that’s the question mark about it for me, that’s the question mark about him. How was he willing, at the age of 24 when he did this, with his whole life in front of him? He must have in some way known that he’s not just trying to kill me, he’s also sacrificing his own life on the basis of nothing. I don’t fully understand that about him, but I guess I don’t fully understand the mindset of the fanatic. I’m glad they found him guilty, and I’m glad he’s probably going to jail for a while. He’s still only 27. I think somebody who’s prepared to be as violent as that on as little provocation, he’s not just a danger to me, but a danger to the community. There we are. I lucked out. Maybe one of the reasons I’d like him to go away for a long time is maybe the next person would not luck out.
Jaramillo: You worked in advertising; you have a relationship with pop culture. [In Knife] you even give a shout out to The Mandalorian. Could you talk a bit about pop culture and your uses of it?
Rushdie: Well, look, I remember being in a movie theater in London when the film that we used to call Star Wars came out, the film that we now have to call Episode Four: A New Hope. Who calls it that? Anyway, I’m sitting there in this movie theater and the strange roller title tells me at once that the film is not about the future, it’s about the past, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I thought, This is not about the day after tomorrow, it’s about the day before yesterday. I thought that was interesting, a clever idea. Then this spaceship starts coming over and it just goes on and on, huger and huger and huger, and I thought, What is going on? And, suddenly, I thought, at that moment, I thought the movies just changed. Something happened which has changed the movies forever. Now, of course, you can only make science fiction movies. It’s easier to get $200 million to make a science fiction movie than to get $10 million to make a good film. That’s because they’re all aimed at 12-year-old kids. I mean, we all have it in us, a 12-year-old kid. I loved Star Wars. I don’t love everything that is now happening with the Star Wars brand. In fact, a lot of it is garbage. But The Mandalorian—this is the way. This is the way.
Christopher Cox: I see that questions are being collected. Without being able to preview these, I’m just going to shuffle them. And I’m going to read them as is.
This card says, “We live in a time that requires courage. How would you encourage people to find and then sustain that courage?”
Rushdie: When the time comes, people find courage. That’s what happens. People who are not brave find that they’re braver than they thought. In this time, there is this problem. When I was at college, the big subject was the Vietnam War—and I was in England, which wasn’t even sending soldiers to Vietnam. But the British government, which was a Labour government, not a Conservative government, was very supportive of the American war effort in Vietnam. There were big demonstrations in England against, not only against the American Embassy but against the British government. I remember being at a demonstration in Cambridge in the Market Square when the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was coming to the square. The demonstration surrounded his car. These days they’re better at these things. But his car came, and he couldn’t move. He had demonstrators all around him. There was somebody I knew at college who was an art student, the least politically activist person that I knew. I suddenly saw him standing on the bonnet of the prime minister’s car jumping up and down, shouting, “Resign, Harold Wilson, self-styled prime minister.” I thought, How did you find this yourself to do that? It was so unlikely. If I had to name somebody I knew who was the least likely person to do something like that, it would’ve been him. Yet he was the one doing it.
That’s what I mean. If something gets your goat enough, you find the ability to say so. I think that was then, this is now. And I do think it’s important to find the power to resist what’s happening, and not just to do what the Democratic Party is doing, which is nothing. Something would be good. A lot would be better. Effectiveness would be even better. To talk about things that people actually want to talk about instead of the sidetracks that the Democratic Party finds itself going down.
People want to talk about whether they can feed their families. People want to talk about why there is a war going on. Why are there two wars going on? Why are there so many wars going on? And why are we helping them? There’s plenty to be angry about, and I get the feeling that people are getting worked up. If only about Teslas. If I was a Tesla, I would not want to go out on the road these days. I feel sorry for Uber drivers. So many of them have Teslas now. It must be embarrassing.
Jaramillo: You put that scene in The Satanic Verses too.
Rushdie: Which one?
Jaramillo: The jumping on the car.
Rushdie: Yeah, I did. I forgot that. You just reminded me. I forgot that I put it in. Again, true story. I’ve found in my work that the stuff that people think I made up is true, and the stuff that people assume is true, I made up. It happens all the time. And that’s what we call fiction.
Cox: Following somewhat in that vein, a question regarding the comment “don’t be the pope” with which you left us: “How can we rethink blasphemy not as a religious mechanism of repression, but now as a political one, especially at this time of state-centered repression and speech. Are we turning politicians into deities?”
Rushdie: I think blasphemy is an outmoded word that they use to describe a concept that should be discarded. Think of different words instead of trying to reinvent an old idea which was bad in the first place, and to make it bad in another way. My answer to the question is just discard it. It has outlived its use. In parts of the world where it is still alive, it is used as an instrument of repression—always. So no more blasphemy, let’s blaspheme all we like. Blaspheme a lot. That’s one of the things that the Enlightenment writers did on purpose. They used blasphemy as a weapon to destroy the Church’s ability to restrict thought, Diderot in La Religieuse, Voltaire in everything, Montesquieu. All of these people, for them, it was a weapon to use against the people who normally use that weapon against everybody. And it worked. After a hundred years, the Church could no longer tell people what they could and could not think. And that was a good thing. You could maybe learn a lesson from that, the actual deliberate use of blasphemy in order to destroy the power of those who use blasphemy as a weapon. Take it back, send it back at them. That’s what they did back in the eighteenth century, when they knew what was what.
Cox: This question asks: “The development of AI has enabled a new way of writing. One can input a writer’s style in AI, which can easily turn ideas into paragraphs, then edit and modify to make the story one’s own. Would you like to use AI and potentially turn your ideas into books faster? Or do you think that makes plagiarism too easy and endangers creativity?”
Rushdie: I just think AI is no good at it. I try very hard not to learn anything about AI, and I do not download ChatGPT or any of that stuff. But I know people who do. Somebody I know programmed or asked ChatGPT to write 200 words of me. It was garbage. It was just absolutely unredeemable garbage, which nobody who’s ever read anything I’ve written would mistake for something by me. I hope. There are probably people who think that my stuff is garbage also.
I hear that these things learn very fast, but they sure have a long way to go. Also, no sense of humor. It’s very difficult to be a machine which tells good jokes unless it’s memorized or had fed into it 5 million jokes. Then it can tell you a version of those jokes. But originality, humor—not yet. To use an analogy, I remember when computers started to play chess. For a while the grandmasters would beat the computers. Now the computers beat the grandmasters. But that’s a game, and it has rules, and it has strategies. A computer can think of a million alternatives to a move in the time that a human being can think of ten. So, I can see how that would work. But writing a sonnet and making it stand up against the good stuff? Haven’t seen it yet. I’m hoping that it won’t happen in my lifetime. I’m quite old.
Cox: Here’s a question with a bit of context first. “In your UN speech, you said, ‘We must focus on telling better stories than what they, the tyrants and fools, do.’ In Midnight’s Children, you called India a collective fiction, and in Shame you called Pakistan the work of an artist which was insufficiently imagined.” Here comes the question. “As a storyteller with an earnest and practical desire to use this art form in order to imagine and effect new anti-fascist, anti-colonial worlds, what principles should one follow in order to stay true to that end? What is the effective role of the author?”
Rushdie: Man. How long have you got? That’s a whole university semester—at least! When I said that in Midnight’s Children and Shame, it’s true: There had never been a country called India until August 15, 1947, when the British left. There had been a large part of the country which the British Empire had controlled, and there was quite a substantial part of the country which was composed of princely states. And the independent nation of India came into being and had never previously existed. That was a collective dream we all agreed to dream. Therefore the country exists because people believed it did. Pakistan, it was quite demonstrably under-imagined because it split in half not long afterwards. It showed that religion was by itself not sufficient as glue to hold together very different communities.
You have to work these things out. I don’t have a clever answer for you, but I do think that one of the problems we face now is that, in this age of lies, people have been buying the lies. People believe the lies. So the world according to the lie is often more powerful than the truth. I saw an interview with Margaret Atwood in which somebody said, “Why do you make up stuff when the world is full of lies? Why are you adding lies to that?” I don’t exactly remember what she said, but, to paraphrase, she said, “The difference between fiction and lies is that fiction, whatever it does and whatever techniques it uses, whether they’re naturalistic or fabulistic or whatever, the purpose of fiction is to move towards the truth.” It’s to tell some kind of truth about who we are, and why we are that way, and how we behave with each other, and why we do it, and why we don’t do the things we should do, and what we are like as human beings. That’s the truth toward which fiction moves. And the lie is a way of obscuring the truth. It’s a way of moving away from the truth. So these two things, which feel as if they’re similar, are actually the opposites of each other. Maybe the answer to the question is: Write better fiction. I hope there’s somebody in the audience who will do that.
Cox: Somebody asks, “Your multicultural profile allowed you to thrive in the literary world. I was born and raised in three different countries, my adult life in New York City. Although I speak several languages, English is not my native tongue. Where do I start? Which story do I tell? Memoir, novel, which genre?”
Rushdie: I think we need to get to know each other better before I can answer that question. Well, first of all, I’ll talk about language, because English is not my mother tongue either. My mother tongue is Urdu. My mother used to say that I didn’t speak it very well, but that’s what mothers are for. I think there are very, very few writers in the history of literature who have been good writers in more than one language. Nabokov is one. I can’t even find enough for the fingers of a hand. So you have to decide which language you love. Literature is an act of love. You have to decide which is the language that says better who you are, and what you think about, and what you feel. What is the language you love? Write in that language, whatever that may be. It could be Yiddish, I don’t care. There is at least one Nobel laureate in Yiddish. Maybe there’ll be two. So, first, decide what you love, I think, and art comes from that. There are writers who love nature, and they write pastoral fiction. There are writers who love the city, and they write urban fiction. Learn for yourself what it is that really expresses your love and write that. That’s the best I can do.
Cox: Last question: “As someone who feels that you should have won the Nobel Prize for literature years ago, I wonder what you think of such literary prizes.”
Rushdie: Oh my. Well, they’re very nice when you win. I remember the best answer to that question that I’ve ever heard was when the novelist Kingsley Amis—father of Martin Amis, in his old age when one of his last novels won the Booker Prize—gave this interview in which he said—again, I’m paraphrasing—but he said, “I’ve always completely detested this prize, but I’ve just completely changed my mind.”
Literary prizes: You win ‘em, you don’t win ‘em. When you win them, it’s nice. When you don’t win them, who cares?
As for the 18 Swedes in a room, who knows what they think? Sometimes they get it wonderfully right, they introduce the world to writers that the world might not have known about. Olga Tokarczuk, plenty of writers who you didn’t know until the prize was given to them, and then you thought, Oh, this is really a great writer. Sometimes, not so much. When the Nobel Prize started in 1901, Tolstoy was alive. The first year of the Nobel Prize, they gave it to a French writer called Sully Prudhomme. Who? The second year of the Nobel Prize, Tolstoy is still alive, and they give it to a Russian writer, but not Tolstoy. They give it to Ivan Bunin. Who?
I remember once, a long time ago, when I was a much younger writer, I was asked by a British newspaper to write an article about all the Salon des Refusés, all the people who had not won the prize. I never wrote the article, but I did look at it. It goes like this: Tolstoy, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Joyce, Kraus, Kafka, Borges, Nabokov—and that’s just the men. Virginia Woolf, et cetera, et cetera. You could say that that’s a list of the great writers of the twentieth century. So, once you see that, you think, Well, okay, if I win, I’ll take the million dollars. If I don’t win, I won’t get the million dollars, and that’s alright too. You have to not worry about this shit.
