YouSaid · the spoken record

Salman Rushdie

lines on the record: 59
first: 2022-08-15
most recent: 2022-08-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I mean Never say never, you know. But at the moment, I mean, I'm very interested in what's happening where I actually live and in facing up to that. And not even politically because As one of the earlier questions suggested, the world is transforming in all sorts of ways at a very high speed. And that's interesting, to live in a time of very, very rapid change. Has always been inspiring to literature. Shakespeare lived at a time in which the English language was transforming very rapidly. And he became at the heart of that transformation. So much of the language we now use was stuff that Shakespeare made up. But to live at a time of transformation is a highly creative experience. Try to keep a hold of that, you know, trying to ride that horse.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of the Congress leaders arrested and jailed. And the Muslim League steps into their shoes to assist with government, and that's seen as being... Betrayal. And I think maybe after the Quit India Resolution, it was impossible to prevent it. But at some point in the late 30s, at the beginning of the 40s, I think it was still possible. I mean, it didn't happen. And one of the things I was taught as a history student was never ask the question, what if? It's hard enough to understand what actually happened. What if is an uninteresting question?”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the point is the question is when, you know, because you're right, by the end, by the time you get to 1947, it's not avoidable. But remember that Jinnah didn't start off on the partition side of the argument. He started off on the other side. Was basically driven out of the Congress Party by what he thought of as Gandhi's hostility to his leadership, which may be right or wrong, it's hard to say. There was a particular presidential election inside the Congress Party where Gandhi came down against his opponents and as a result, Jannah was not elected as the president of the Congress, and that's when he began to split away from it and join the separatists. I think there's a moment. In the early 40s When it could have gone another way, that Jana could have been kept inside the Conrad Party. In 1940, there's the Quitter resolution.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pig Lewis was the person who made me want to read French. So that's all of that, the academic side of being at the school. I would give very high marks to, but it was also a time when I had my first experiences of racial prejudice. So there's that side of it too. I remember coming into my little cubicle and finding racist slogan written on the wall, kind of wogs go home. And so, yeah, so I learned that too. I learned that too. And that may not have been a bad lesson to learn either.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, that's so interesting. Well, yeah, I'm sure girls are a big improvement. I felt that the quality of teaching was incredibly high and inspired me. I mean, I had teachers, history teachers, who gave me a love of history. I ended up being what I studied at university. I was actually very bad at French until I met a particular French teacher who inspired me and I then became rather good at French. He was a gentleman called Mr. Lewis, whose initials were PG, which meant that schoolboys, of course, would refer to him as the pig”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It began as a reader. And when I was a little boy, I mean, my parents told me that I would say to their friends when asked, what did I want to do? I didn't say I wanted to be an astronaut. I said I wanted to be a writer. And of course, when you say that as a kid, you have no idea what it means. And I think all you know is that it means I love books. And to want to be a rice man is a completely different thing from being able to be a writer. And when I started trying to be a writer, my great fear was that I would not be able to do the thing which was the only thing that I'd ever wanted to do. Because I had no plan B, really.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Long before I read Joyce, when I was too little to read Joyce. Joyce actually was kind of, as I said, was almost off-putting because the scale of the talent and the achievement was so great that it made me think, well, I can't do that. But, yeah, I mean, I was a bookworm as a kid. And I think a lot of writers come out of readers. A lot of people who are in love with the experience of being with a book, being inside a book as a reader, Conceive of the desire to write the thing that they love being inside. And certainly that was my experience, that I”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's an age of wonderful children's writers. ranging from little children to young adults but Jackie Woodson Neil Gaiman all sorts of people I think children are well served right now by books and seem to read them in. I still read them in substantial quantities. But I do think that World is different, and I mean, I have no idea 50 years down the line what people will think of as their talismanic objects. I hope one of them is a book. That would be nice to think.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think some fundamental things change all the time. That's sort of all right. It's all right that the world changes. And it may well be that an iPhone is a touchstone. I mean, iPhones have colossally transformative in our culture. I mean, even at the political level, I mean, I think one of the reasons why we're having this conversation about racism is because people are able to record racial abuses on their smartphones. It's not that racial abuse is just began. They've been going on throughout the history of this country. But now people can see them and it changes the conversation. So I'm absolutely willing to believe that iPhone could be a transformative object. But it's true that questionnaire is wrong about children's literature because I think children's literature is actually thriving right now.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yeah, I'm lucky that I have for the last three or four books had this wonderful series of readings on audiobooks which are actually much better than I can do myself. So I'm grateful for that. And yes, I do pay attention.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, thanks. I think the answer is I pay a lot of attention to the music of the words. It's really continuing on from what we were saying about lyric writing. I do sometimes, not always, sometimes read passages aloud to myself to see if they sound right. Because actually the ear is a very good judge of mistakes. You can't fool yourself when you hear yourself saying something that isn't right. It gets past your defenses. So, yeah, sometimes I do, and particularly with long dialogue sections. Because the difficulty of dialogue is to differentiate properly, so that the two people each sounds like themselves. And it should be possible to write dialogue without having to say who's speaking. You should know that from how they're speaking. So, yeah, I pay attention a lot to the music of it.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in the first year, we would give it to two artists every two years rather than one a year. That's sort of more fun. And the first year, we gave it to Leonard Cohen and Chuck Berry. And they both came, and it was an extraordinary moment because they'd never met. And Leonard Cohen said this very sweet thing about Chuck Berry, who he said, you know, everything began with Chuck Berry. He said if Beethoven hadn't rolled over, there wouldn't have been room for any of us.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He is a great writer. He is a great writer. And actually, one of the things partly because of my, I think there's a lot of very great lyricists right now of whom Dylan is very near at the pinnacle, you know, and then Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, you know, Tom Waits, any number of them. And one of the arguments I would have when I was president of Pen America was saying that we need to broaden our understanding of what literature is and that there is no way really that you can say that these writers are inferior to most novelists who get their books published. They're actually at least as good, if not better, than most novelists. After a very long fight, I managed for some time to persuade Penn to Start granting lifetime achievement awards for lyrics writing. Dylan said he didn't want it. He said.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that is poetry as close as anything. And so pictorial, it's full of pictures all the way through, the haunted, frightened trees, the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. I mean, that's very good stuff. So that's why, as I say”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the one which is most poetically beautiful. So maybe I'll just recite that. It's the one which goes, take me, this is the drug one that I mentioned. Take me disappearing through the smokerings of my mind, down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, the haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. That's very good that. Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until tomorrow. Hey, Mr. Tamarine, man, play a song for me, etc. I mean, that's.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trying to have a memory competition with Christopher Hitchens is the dumbest move you could ever make. Christopher had a retentive power for verse and for poetry greater than anybody I've ever known. And you could say to Christopher, Shelley, and he would do 20 minutes just from memory. He could do Byron, etc. And he could do Dylan. So we used to have these competitions, which I would always lose, but they were enjoyable. And I used to be able to do tamarind from memory, but now I'm 73. So it's got quite what it was. I actually think the last villas, the last verse of Tamarine Man.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the thing that most appealed to me about it is the surrealism, the kind of fabulous nature of the song. As you know, that's kind of been my inclination as a writer anyway. And Dylan, I mean, Dylan's writing is very beautiful and it showed me a lot of his writing. What I resist a little bit is people saying that Dylan is a great poet. Because to my mind, the words and the music are so entwined. I don't know what it would be like. For somebody to read Bob Dylan's lyrics who had never heard the music. Some of the songs, I think, would not hold up. I think actually Tamarine Man is the one that comes very close to holding up. I think it's actually lyrically very powerful. And, for example, I used to be able to do this. I used to have... Bob Dylan memory competitions with Christopher Hitchens. Let me just tell you”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He could deny it all he likes. Okay, he denies it, so what? Take me disappearing down the smoke rings of my mind, really? But I never did acid. I was always much too scared to take those drugs. And so in a way, my only experience of an acid trip is through. A tamarine man in songs like that.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the four sides of the double album is a single song. A sad-eyed lady of the lowlands is the whole side of the album. So he got people used in a way, I guess to reading very long books. Dylan got people like me used to listening to very long songs and finding the richness of them. Also, of course, it's a psychedelic song. And so the song is about an acid trip.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most famous one is the birds did it, but the birds turn it into this kind of tumty-tum song. Which it sort of isn't. And people have tried to cover like a rolling stone and it's no good. The one song of his that I think, well, there's a few songs that people have tried to cover successfully. Just like a woman has had a lot of very good cover versions and I shall be released. Songs like that. But tamarine man, I don't think anybody, I mean, the birds version is pathetic, really. But I remember it struck me, first of all, first of all, it's a story song. And it's a long song. So it actually breaks what used to be the kind of rule in the early 60s that pop songs had to be under three minutes long. Suddenly you have much longer songs coming out of Dylan. And a bit later when he released Blonde on Blonde,”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have seen him quite a few times. Yeah, most recently, about a year ago, he had a gig at the Beacon Theatre here in New York. And I went, and I mean, he's really not singing anymore. He's sort of doing something halfway between growling and shouting. I mean, his band is terrific, and the words are great, but he used to be, I mean, he never had a great singing voice, but he had a very expressive singing voice, and he had very unique phrasing, which is why very, very few people have been able to improve on a Dylan song. Cover Dylan all the time”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened was when I was in my early days at boarding school at rugby, a friend of mine in the same boarding house as I was in got hold of a couple of Dylan albums. And was very, very excited and summoned me into his little cubicle. We used to call him studies, but they were really the size of a shoebox. And he said, sit down and listen to this. And then he said, he said, don't say anything until you've heard the whole record. and he put on the LP, the vinyl LP, and played the two sides of bringing it all back home. And I'm in love with it. And I opened my mouth and he said, no, no, no. You have to listen to it all again. He made me listen to the whole album again. And by the end of that, I was, you know, I was a Dylan fan and I have remained so ever since, although his voice isn't what it used to be, sadly.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, as I say, it could have been a lot of tracks. And by the way, I'm fine with Dylan winning the Nobel Prize, but I just think all of us should be given grammars in that case”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Limit speech. But now there's a kind of pressure from the left from what people would call themselves progressives to outlaw certain kinds of utterance. I've always thought of democracy as being like the town square. There you are in the town square. And it's an argument. Everybody's having an argument. And the argument never ends. But the ability to have the argument. What I would call freedom because in dictatorships, the first thing that happens is people shut down the argument. And so I think when the pressure comes from the right and the left, that space for debate is squeezed. And I worry about that”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Comes from The right wing, and it comes generationally it comes from an older generation. And younger people are more iconoclastic, more willing to throw out the garbage of the old and the left traditionally has been in favor of free expression. And what we now see, that's still happening. I mean, here, sitting here in New York where the Trump administration conducts a daily attack on the freedom of the press, such as I've never seen in a democracy. So there is still that pressure from the right.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not that, I mean, Annie's taken pictures of black people before, she's taken pictures of Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey and Serena Williams and, you know, all sorts of people. But she got this one wrong. But the thing that amazed me was the fact that this young man, ashamed to say I can't remember his name, is the first black photographer ever to be asked to take the cover photograph for Vality Fair. Ever. And that's what I mean by power So, I think the argument sometimes crosses into two or three different arguments. I think the question of power, the question of being able to enter other realities, and how do you do that? That's one set of questions. The question of silencing opinions that you don't agree with, to my mind, is another question. Because historically, and certainly in my own experience, The pressure for censorship.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Across the media happening in television, it's happening in the film industry, it's happening in book publishing, etc. I think that's a very important and valuable conversation that more sorts of people need to be able to have access to speech. And I saw the other day, I don't know, there's been this fuss about Ali Liewowitz did a cover of, took a photograph of Simone Biles for Vogue and everybody thought it was a terrible picture. And then meanwhile, a young black photographer took a picture of Viola Davis for the cover of Vanity Fair. And it's a fantastic picture. And basically he knew how to light black skin.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About experiences which are not your own. And right out of that knowledge, I think right what you know is fair enough, but then sometimes you have to increase what you know in order to be able to write. And then there's the other question which I have great sympathy, which is the question of power. Who gets to hold the microphone? Who is denied that? And I think that conversation that's happening right now.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not yeah. I mean, I sometimes envy Philip Roth for having had the strength to stop. But I don't plan to stop. Look, I mean, here's the thing about, first of all, who owns material, this question about whether my view is nobody owns material. Anybody can write about anything because otherwise... Know men could only write about men and women could only write about women and short people could only write about short people and fat people could only write about fat people and so on. It becomes very quickly ludicrous. But that doesn't mean that you can be lazy about it, especially if you're stepping away from your own experience of life. To enter into a very radically other experience of life, whether that's racially other or sexually other or whatever it might be. Then it becomes your business to get that right and to find out.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or people will see that the underlying drive of the book, its characters and story, in a way, emerge when that topicality is lessened. And I didn't know which it would be. I literally didn't know.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Matter, then it becomes like yesterday's papers. I was worried about this, actually, when I was writing Midnight's children, because at the climax of Midnight's Children, there is this period in the mid-70s in India called the Emergency, when Mrs. Ganthi suspended democracy for about three years and took on authoritarian powers. But I remember When I was writing the book Are worrying that a time would come at some point when nobody cared in the Ragandi or the emergency. And I remember saying to myself, when that happens, this book is either going to get worse or it's going to get better. It's either going to be... Either going to be damaged by being too topical when that topicality has faded.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He doesn't make the mistake of making his books based on political issues. And as a result, they don't date. And that, I think, was a lesson that I learned, which is that it's one thing to say public affairs are a part of private life. And so if you're going to understand the private life, that needs to be a dimension that you include. The point is to make it a dimension which explains your characters and their lives rather than making it the subject. If you make it the subject, then, you know, we live in an age even more so than when Joyce was writing. We live in an age in which things move very fast, in which the subject changes very fast. And if your book is too rigidly linked to a particular”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I mean, actually, that's the other thing I think that you get from reading Joyce now is that even though he disapproved of the idea that literature should be political. His literature is full of politics. So, you know, don't listen to what writers say. Look at what they do. Joyce had this idea that writing should be, he said, static, not dynamic, by which he meant it should simply be. It should not attempt to persuade or to argue. It should be an essence rather than a kind of polemic. In the dead, there's a political argument where people are talking about the Irish politics at the time. And Ulysses is full of people, there are varying degrees of sobriety having political arguments. So politics is all there all the time in him. And yet,”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it helped a lot literature just to have the history of literature to think about. And the fact is that I'm not the first writer to have had a difficult time. Dostoevsky faced a firing squad. It was a pretend firing squad they didn't actually shoot him, but he didn't know that. He didn't know that it was just being done to stay him. And Joyce himself had a very difficult life politically. He was in exile from Ireland most of his life. And his relationship with Ireland was very sad. I mean, so much so. That when he died his widow, nor a bonicle, Nora Joyce, they were broke. And she asked for the help of the Irish government to repatriate his body. and the help was refused. In her now, he is an industry in Ireland, in the way that now there's a bridge named after Samuel Beckett, another person that they didn't like.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I know there are so many cases of writers who were enormously celebrated in their lifetimes, who fell into obscurity quite soon afterwards. And vice versa, writers who were not so well regarded in their lifetime, who became part of the fabric of the literary canon. So you'd never know. All you can do is put it out there. Like Midnight's Children, for example, that it's now, I mean, 1981, it's almost 40 years since it came out. It's 45 years since I started writing it. And the fact that people still find it valuable, that there are still readers who respond well to it. That feels great, you know, because that means that it's left a couple of generations already. And if it could go on doing that, then maybe it'll stick around. But that's, yeah, that's what, of course you think about that. You can't write for the future.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I just hope there is one. I mean, obviously, if you write my kind of books rather than pulp fiction, there's a part of you that is writing for posterity. There's a part of you that hopes that these books will outlive you, that they, I mean, I remember Martin Amos having this nice phrase once where he said that, you know, when he wanted to leave behind was a shelf of books. He wanted to be able to say from here to here it's me. And that's what you hope for, you know, and you have no idea if it's going to happen.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“no more than twenty years old. That's more than half a century ago. No, I say I've read it these stories and this novel three or four times in the interim and they feel like somewhat different texts each time because I'm bringing something different to it.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I think Joyce in general. Because people think of him as difficult. And as I say, Finnegan's way very difficult. But the other stuff, not so much, really. And I think what people miss when they are scared off, Joyce, is the very deep humanity of his writing, his incredibly deep love of human beings. And wonderful writer of women, Molly Blue Soloquy at the end of Ulysses is maybe the best piece of writing that a man has ever done about a woman's interior life. And very funny, you know, there's a lot of joyce that is very funny. And also it has the quality of great literature, which is that every time you read it, it gives you something else. It gives you something you didn't have the previous time. Partly that's because you change.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought well, what are you going to do? All be he's done it. It's all done here. And, you know, I can't do this. It must be like a young, 19 or 20-year-old writer who wants to be a playwright reading Shakespeare. Thinking I may as well give up”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at the very end of the film, when we've had this whole emotional scene, the camera simply does what the story does. The camera turns to the window and looks out at the window and there's snow falling outside. And instead of there being actors acting, voiceover comes in and just reads that passage. And what it felt to me watching the film was that we had gone from watching a very good film. hearing genius that there's a difference between the very good and the great and that passage of Joyce actually just made me think okay that really just is as good as it gets you can't write better than that and actually it scared me Joyce's work scared me because when I as a young man read it”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has the power of intense beauty. And that, in a way, is a greater power than what it's saying. Yes, it's about human life as we live it. Michael Fury, the young man was referred to in the passage, is the dead man that his wife used to love. And the snow is falling, the beautiful reversal, falling faintly, faintly falling over all the living and the dead. In a way, the living and the dead are united by the snow. I've always remembered when John Houston made his film of the dead. It's a very good film with Angelica Houston and Gabriel Byrne as the married couple.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hill, falling softly upon the bog of Allen and farther westward softly falling into the dark, mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Fury lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones on the spheres of the little gate on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling like the descent of their vast end upon all the living at the dead. Don't get better than”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gabriel is the man. This is when he's begun to weep because he realizes what we've just been saying. He realizes that the real love of his wife's life is a man who has died. And he goes to look out of the window And a few light taps on the Made him turn to the window. It had begun to slow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamp light.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Husband and wife, and the husband discovers in the course of the story that his wife has really loved another man who died for her. And he realizes that whatever he does, he can never live up to that. He can never live up to the love of somebody who died for her. And so even though, you know, they don't break up or anything, they're together. But he just has to understand that he will always come second and that the dead, the power of the dead is greater than the power of the living”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Therefore, had to read Finnegan's weight and a lot of French nouveau romaciers. Michel Boutor and Natalie Sarot, etc. Painful experience. And of course, Finnegan's wake is by far the most complicated and difficult of Joyce's books. And I had trouble with it as everybody does. And I went sort of backwards through Joyce. So I went from Finnegan's Wake back into Ulysses and from that back into the portrait of the artist as a young man. And the books become, as you go back in time, they become increasingly accessible. By the time you get to Dubliners, it's just really very beautiful stories. And I do think the dead is an unbelievably moving story because it's about”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was beginning to think about being a writer, I suppose when I was at Cambridge, and I hadn't really written anything worth mentioning. Joyce was one of the what became one of the kind of giant figures for me. And in a kind of funny way, because I was going out with somebody who was doing a dissertation on Finnegan's Wake and the French Nouveau Roman Roman Romance. As I must say, as an act of great love,”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's a reminder of all of that, especially as I said, because my dad kept it locked up. He wasn't very good at looking after things, actually. I mean, I've often told the story of this first short story I ever wrote, which was based on having seen the Wizard of Oz. And he got his secretary to type it up for me. And then he said, look, if I give it to you, you'll lose it. So I'll look after it. And then he lost it.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you say, there's an administration in India which is much more a kind of Hindu nationalist government and has trying with some success to move away from that idea, which I think is a great sadness.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think the philosopher Sanil Kilnani has a wonderful book called The Idea of India, and he explores this idea of a secular estate, how hard it is for, in fact, a very religious country, a country in which almost everybody has religious belief, for everybody to agree with each other that that will not be an element of the state, that religion will remain a private matter, it will not be publicly powerful or empowered. And one of the reasons in India for that was precisely because of the partition massacres in which so many Muslims were killed by Hindus and Hindus by Muslims, that the idea was that if you had a sectarian constitution, It would perpetuate that kind of violence. And that the way of keeping the peace was to take religion out of the public arena. And I mean, it worked for a long time.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People, there are still some of them there. And the southern part of the island, as it now is, is still called Colaba after them. And that's probably as old a name as you could get. Mumbai is a concocted name. And so I don't use it. It's a generational thing. I think a lot of people in my generation still say Bombay and a lot of younger people growing up who have not known anything except Mumbai say that without a problem.”
2022-08-15 · Intelligence Squared · Salman Rushdie: Touchstones with Razia Iqbal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT