Whole Earth magazine ran a wonderfully pithy interview with Salman Rushdie in ‘99. Here’s Rushdie on how his golden Bombay was actually quite new:

… the city that I grew up in was a very new city… only fifteen or twenty years old… Malabar Hill, Warden Road, Breach Candy, Mahalaxmi… They aged rapidly because everything in India goes to hell very fast… I remember the first skyscraper being built on Malabar Hill; the people in the city used to contemptuously refer to it as Matchbox House because it looked like a giant matchbox standing on its side. We all told each other that it would never catch on. One of the many things about which we were wrong. [Link]

On visiting the Playboy mansion:

I had my photograph taken with the Playmate of the Year, that was the high spot. She’s called “Heather.” She’s a very nice girl. Reads a lot. Particularly eighteenth-century French fiction. Montaigne, you know. Anyway, she also had an improbable body. So, I mean really, what more could you ask for? As you can tell, I avoided meeting Margaret Thatcher, who’s not like that at all. [Link]

On being rejected by desis in London:

The novel is actually in large part about the Asian community in London, and to see those people protesting against the novel was one of the most painful sights of my life… [Link]

He speaks of the lost Bombay is similar to how he speaks of the lost tolerant Islam:

… when there was communal trouble in the rest of India, there was very little in Bombay. It was a part of people’s self-definition. They would say, “Oh, we don’t do that stuff.” Then, unfortunately, it became apparent that the place had changed, and that that kind of violence did come to Bombay… Now it’s a very different place because it’s run by a Hindu Nationalist Party of very fanatical extremists… So that Bombay, the tolerant, openhearted, secularized Bombay, has gone. [Link]

On how his appearance with Mephisto at the U2 concert came about:

… when they were on their last but one big tour–the 1993 Europa Tour–they were at Wembley Stadium and I was going to go to the show and they said, Do you want to come up on stage? I said, What would I do? And they said, Oh, we’ll think of something. So I said all right, and I was led backstage before the show and we worked out a little dialogue routine. [Link]

On why he likes the technique of alternate realities, like in The Ground Beneath Her Feet:

André Breton’s idea was that the world is full of marvels, and that our habituation to it forms a kind of veil over our eyes… One of the primary techniques for that was the idea of making strange, to take the familiar and make it strange–and therefore, with any luck, make it fresh… [Link]

On why his maximalist style keeps people entertained:

Aesop’s fables are very, very boring, if anybody’s ever read them. Because you can sort of see the punch line coming from the first line; he’s like somebody who can’t tell a joke who goes on and on telling jokes. But, I thought, if you take away the easy motto at the end, then the form of the fable is wonderfully flexible. It hits a very beautiful note somewhere between the real and the unreal…

… the old stories of ancient custom in India have been there for a long time, and if people get bored with an old storyteller, they get up and walk away. That’s what people most enjoyed sitting and listening to: narrative as performance, narrative as games playing. Complicated looping, twirling, kind of pyrotechnic narrative is what kept these audiences sitting there… [Link]

On learning to be a political operator during the fatwa:

The language that you try to develop as a writer is developed with great care of many years in order to try to tell more and more truth, really. The language you learn as a politician isn’t quite like that. If you go into the corridors of power and start speaking the naked truth, you don’t get what you want. People are shocked and slightly horrified, and so you have to learn to speak in certain locutions and snaky forms of speech. [Link]

On his celebrity overshadowing his craft:

There was this colossal scandal about a book, and the only question no journalist would ever ask me was a literary question… I remember that Martin Amis used a wonderful phrase at the time of the trouble beginning, when he said about me that he felt that I had vanished into the front page. I must say that is more or less exactly how it felt. And what I’m trying to do now is to reappear in the cultural section. [Link]