Salman Rushdie: how I write

The award-winning author this year published his 14th novel, Quichotte, inspired by the Cervantes classic Don Quixote, set in modern-day America. He spoke with broadcaster Nikki Bedi about an author’s life

“When I told my father I wanted to be a writer he said with genuine pain, ‘What will I tell my friends?’ Fortunately, he lived long enough for his friends to start calling and congratulating him and then obviously, he took the credit.”

“We all have this very rich, imagined story life and then most of us grow out of it. And I think there’s a few freakish people who don’t grow out of it and they become writers.”

“What I would say to Western readers about Midnight’s Children and those early books is, this isn’t fantasy, this is understatement. The real thing is so much stranger that if I put that in a book you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Margaret Atwood is my old buddy and I’m happy for her that at the age of 80 she’s having this colossal triumph. We were sending each other mischievous messages before the Booker, in which she said to me, ‘I think we’re there to represent the still-ambulatory old poops’.” “Some people, particularly very young reviewers reviewing my books, do tend to say I am prone to what they call ‘dad jokes’. That’s a new thing: they didn’t used to be ‘dad jokes’; they used to just be bad jokes.”

“I like having another language up my sleeve. When you switch language, in a way, you switch character a little bit.”

“I remember the first time I was ever asked to do a book reading. A lady stood up and said, ‘Thank you, Mr Rushdie, because you have told my story’. And I almost cried. I thought, ‘God,

I didn’t expect the book to have that kind of effect on people’.”

“You have personal fears, which are to do with growing older and I think this novel [Quichotte] is about mortality — it’s about people facing that fact which is there for all of us.” “And there’s the professional fear, which is you worry about not having another good book in you. There’s always that.”

“I’m much closer to the kind of jazz version of writing than to the symphonic version. When I was younger, I needed to have the skeleton before I could put flesh on it. As time has gone on, I’m much more willing to trust the moment of creation — to see what happens in the act of writing.”