MALE SPEAKER: The
first time I read Salman Rushdie was in Spanish. It was "The Moor's Last Sigh." I like it so much that
I reread it in English, but first I had to get
a bigger dictionary. His first book,
"Midnight Children," he talks about the independence
of India from Britain, and also, he talks about how
the people moved from Pakistan to India and how colonial
India divided itself. His books, even though
they talk about fantasy, they reflect a lot of
the world we live in. His latest book, "Joseph
Anton, A Memoir," he not only talks about
the reality of the world, but also the reality
of his life when a writer has to go into hiding. Without more further ado, I
want to introduce and welcome Salman Rushdie. [APPLAUSE] SALMAN RUSHDIE:
Hello, everybody. I'm just saying, that's quite
a high percentage of the people here that I'm keeping
from work, so that's good. Well, what I'm going to do
is talk for a little bit, and read a little bit,
and then hopefully answer your questions. Can you all hear fine? Yes? OK. You know, most writers don't
have interesting lives. Most writers-- some of them
go to the south of France, some of them go to bullfights. Mostly they sit in small,
poorly lighted rooms and work. I acquired the problem
of an interesting life. And, I mean, this book is
about that problem, really. But the writing mentality
is a very bizarre one, because even at the worst
moment of your life, which, essentially,
this was, there's a little voice of yourself
sitting on your shoulder whispering in your ear
saying, good story. And encouraging you to do
your best to remember it. And so if somebody was asking
me about keeping journals, I've never been
the kind of writer who really kept
detailed journals. Some of my friends
do, but I never really had that temperament
or patience. But when this episode began,
when I was about 41 years old, so much was happening so fast
that was so complex that I realize that no matter how
good my memory might be, there was no way to remember it. There was no way to remember
the dailiness of it-- the step by step-ness of it, you know. What happened as it happened. And so I thought, because of
this little voice in my head saying, good story, I thought
I better write it down. I'd better start
keeping a record. And so for about 12 years, I did
keep a quite detailed journal, and then put it aside
and didn't look at it again for many years,
until I started writing this book
only a few years ago. And when I went back to look
at the journal, first of all, there's thousands
of pages of it. I found it to be useful, but
not in the way that I expected. That's to say, I thought there
might be, you know, stuff there that I could just more or
less lift and put in the book. There was surprisingly
little of that. Surprisingly little
material that I could just, you know, cut and paste. Because for much of
the time, the pressure on the person writing the
book-- the burden of the event was so great that, you
know, the younger me that was writing the book
was clearly not always in the best shape. And so what the
journal became valuable for was as a record of my
mental state, you know? About how I was feeling,
how I was dealing with it, how I was failing
to deal with it. And so it became an insight into
the life of a character called with my name, but it
needed to be rewritten. It needed to be rewritten from
this point in my life looking back. So I couldn't have done
it without the journal, but oddly, it has
very little to do with the journal in terms
of the actual sentences and the way it's written. The title comes out
of the fact that I was asked at a certain point
by the British Special Branch, which is the secret
police, essentially-- there's a particular department
of the Special Branch which does personal protection. It's called A Squad. And they protect the prime
minister and other government ministers and other people
who are thought to need it. They wanted me to
have a pseudonym, mostly so that they could
train themselves not to use my real name by accident
when they were in public. If they were around
the corner from where I was staying at a supermarket,
and accidentally said, oh, Salman asked us to buy a
packet of crisps or some candy, and then that would blow
the whole protection. So they had to train
themselves to use a name that wasn't my name. And so they said,
think of something. And I didn't know
what name to choose. Again, I've never been
the kind of writer who was interested in pen names. There are writers who
very successfully spend their careers writing
under names not their own. John le Carre, for example, was
really called David Cornwell. And Anthony Burgess,
whose real name was John Anthony Burgess Wilson
and used his middle names as his writing name. But I never was at all
interested in having any name on my books
other than mine. And then suddenly, I had
to have a name in real life that wasn't mine. And in the end, I
just decided to start fooling around with names
of writers that I admired and putting them together
and seeing if they worked. And in the end, I mean,
there were some kind of comically bad attempts,
like Marcel Beckett. Nobody's called Marcel Beckett. But Joseph Anton, which came
from Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, seemed
to have the merit of sounding like a name
somebody might actually have. And that was the main
reason for choosing it was that it
sounded convincing. But in the end, I came to feel
that both Conrad and Chekhov had something to do with
the condition that I was in. You know, Chekhov,
particularly in his plays, is a great master of
writing about people in a state of isolation and
loneliness and people wanting to be somewhere other
than where they're stuck. His three sisters
yearning to return to a Moscow to which
they can't return. And I thought, well,
I know how that feels. And so I felt there
was a part to me that had fallen into a kind
of Chekhovian atmosphere. And Conrad-- well,
Conrad, first of all, wrote a lot about spies
and secret agents, and, you know, about this kind
of underworld of intelligence and espionage and
sabotage and so on. And so I thought somehow I was
in this bizarre world which was both Conradian
and Chekhovian. You can imagine these two
writers couldn't be more unlike each other,
and that suggests how surrealist the reality was. One of the characteristics it
had is it took about 12 years. Everybody thought it would
take a few weeks, a few days. When this began-- when
the attack on "The Satanic Verses" and its authors and
publishers and so on first began, it was so outrageous that
the head of a foreign country should order the assassination
of a citizen of Britain in his own country
who had committed no crime in that
country, and to threaten to send killers to carry it out. Everybody thought--
politicians thought it, the police thought
it-- this can't stand. This has to be stopped. And I remember the police
saying to me when they first came to offer protection--
they said, look, we just have to go
away for a few days. You just have to lie
low for a few days. Find a hotel in the countryside. We'll just go there and
just keep your head down. Stay out of the papers and let
the politicians do their work. Let the diplomats do their work. This is going to get fixed,
because it has to get fixed. It's outrageous. So everybody went
into this thinking it was going to take a few days. And when I left my house
on that basis, I thought, OK, it's going to
take a while, and then everything's going to quiet
down and I'll be home. Well, it took 12 years. And this is really the
story of those 12 years. And one of the characteristics
this period had of living with police
officers and worrying about all these larger
issues in the world is that there were
many moments where it was ridiculously funny. And that's something
you wouldn't expect. But it had the
characteristic of being simultaneously
funny and not funny. The thing that was
not funny was funny. And, I mean, I remember
being taken at one point to have dinner at the
house of my friend the British Pakistani
writer Hanif Kureishi, and when we left at
the end of the evening, one of the policemen
forgot his gun. And of course, Hanif
was overjoyed by this and came running
out into the street holding the gun by
the barrel, waving it like this, shouting, "Here! You forgot your shooter!" So this was ridiculously
farcical comedy. There was a moment when
my then very young son-- he's now grown up-- and I
were taken by the police to a kind of fun fair. A kind of holiday fun fair. And there was one of those
shooting gallery places. And my little boy decided
there was a particular soft toy on the top shelf that
he particularly liked. And I tried to
explain to him that to get the one on the
top shelf, you basically have to get all the ducks. And it's kind of impossible,
because these guns that they give you are all
bent out of shape, and the sights don't work,
and it's sort of a scam. And one of the police officers,
who we used to call Fat Jack-- is because his name
was Jack and he was fat-- he overheard me
talking to Zafar about this. And he came over and he said,
which toy does he fancy, then? And I said, well, it's
that one up there. And he said, oh, all right. And he went over and
put down his pound coin and was given his terrible
little shooting weapon, and he looked at it. He kind of went, hm. OK. And he went, boom,
boom, boom, boom, boom. Knocked everything down. And there's the
poor fairground guy going-- He's never seen
anybody shoot like this. And he got all of them. And he turned to the
guy, and he said, yeah. We'll have that one, please. So there were these
sort of moments which were ridiculous, in a way. I want to read you--
for a long time, it was more or less
impossible for me to go anywhere, except be in
England in this strange cocoon. But gradually, I knew
that I had to fight back. And there was the
beginning of what became quite a large political
campaign around the world to get political support to get
this thing removed, which did, in the end, work. The whole traveling thing
was often very difficult. But the first time I was able
to come to the United States was about two years in. And I'd been invited to
address a free speech conference at
Columbia University. And I managed to get
over to New York. And the NYPD got a
little overexcited. So I just wanted to read
you-- it'll show you what I mean about
funny and not funny. Oh, the book is written
in the third person. So I'm not I. I'm he. And that's, in a way, just
to make a slight distinction between the author writing
the book and the author being written about as being not
exactly the same person, not at the same point in
their lives, et cetera. Anyway, he. So this is just
arriving in New York. He was met on the tarmac
at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey by a nine car motorcade
with motorcycle outriders. The central car was an
armored white stretch limo. That was his car. In charge of the
very large number of NYPD officers involved
was Lieutenant Bob Kennedy, known for the day
as Hudson Commander. Lieutenant Bob
introduced himself and explained the scenario,
often breaking off to speak into his sleeve. "Roger, Hudson Lookout. This is Hudson Commander. Out. Roger that." Policemen nowadays
spoke the way they had seen policemen speak on TV. Lieutenant Bob, it
was clear, thought he was in a major movie. "We'll be moving
you through the city to the hotel in this
vehicle right here," he said redundantly as
the motorcade set off. "Lieutenant Bob," he
said, "this is a lot. The nine vehicles, the
motorbikes, the sirens, the flashing lights,
all of these officers. Wouldn't it actually
be safer just to drive me through the back
streets in a used Buick?" Lieutenant Bob looked at him
with the pitying look people reserve for the chronically
stupid or insane. "No, sir, it would
not," he replied. "Who else would you do something
on this scale for, Lieutenant Bob?" "Sir, this right here is
what we do for Arafat." It was something of a
shock to be bracketed with the leader of the
Palestinian Liberation Organization. "Lieutenant Bob, if I was the
president, how much more would you do?" "Sir, if you're with the
president of these United States, we'd close down a whole
bunch of these side streets here, sir, and sir,
we'd have snipers on the rooftops along the route. But in your case, we didn't
think that was necessary, because it would look
too conspicuous." The inconspicuous
nine vehicle motorcade rolled towards Manhattan with
motorcycle sirens blaring and lights flashing,
attracting no attention at all. And Andrew's my agent. Andrew Wiley was waiting
for him at the hotel. In the presidential
suite, there were bulletproof padded mattresses
covering all the windows, even though they were
on the top floor. And there were perhaps two dozen
men holding gigantic science fiction weapons scattered
through the rooms. So there's a brief
episode there where I'm visited by Susan
Sontag and Allen Ginsberg. Allen Ginsberg made
us sit on the floor cross legged and meditate. A little while later,
Elizabeth-- Elizabeth was my girlfriend then. She became my wife. She's the mother
of my youngest son. A little while later,
Elizabeth arrived unannounced, and Lieutenant
Bob brought her in to see him surrounded
by armed men. "It's OK, Lieutenant Bob,"
he said. "Elizabeth's cool. Elizabeth's with me." Kennedy narrowed his eyes. "If I wanted to kill you,
sir," he said insanely, wearing his best crazy
Jack Nicholson look, "she's exactly who I'd send." He said, "How so,
Lieutenant Bob?" Kennedy gestured
towards the table on which there was an
arrangement of fruits and cheeses, as well
as cutlery and plates. "Sir, if she were to take
one of those folks there, sir, and stab you in the
neck, I'd lose my job, sir." Andrew Wiley was finding
it difficult to keep a straight face,
and Elizabeth was known as the mad forkist
for the rest of the trip. That evening, they were in
the armored white stretch limo in the middle
of the nine vehicle motorcade with the
motorcycle outriders and the sirens and
the flashing lights, zooming down 125th Street
towards the Columbia campus at 60 miles an hour
with the whole of Harlem out on the sidewalk watching
the low profile operation ghost almost imperceptibly by. And Andrew was
screaming with delight at the outrageousness
of it all, "This is the best day of my life!" Then the fun, the slightly
hysterical black comedy fun, was over. He was concealed behind a
curtain at the [INAUDIBLE] library, and when his
name was announced, there was a shocked
gasp as he moved forward out of invisibility
into the light. Then there's pause. Then I had to make my speech. And, as I say here, the
moment the speech was over, America unceremoniously
threw him out. I literally wasn't even
allowed to spend the night. But you see what I mean? That it's simultaneously
ridiculously funny and not funny at all. And this surreal
real characteristic persisted through
all those years. I mean, of course, there
were moments which were not at all funny, which were very
dark and serious and difficult. But anyway, I wanted
to say that one of the reasons I think
that I'm standing here and one of the reasons why
this story ended the way it did is because there was a colossal
collective act of support which was not from governments
and politicians and so on. I mean, as usual, they were
somewhat late to the party. It was from ordinary people. It was from people running. I've always felt
that the bookstores were the front
line of this thing. The bookstores were where
there was physical danger to people working there
and to the property. There were-- Cody's
Bookstore in Berkeley, California was pipe bombed, and
there were fire bomb attacks elsewhere in this country
and in many other countries. There were physical threats
to the staff of bookstores and so on. And yet, the booksellers
of America and the world just simply refused
to be defeated, and put the book
in their windows, and recommended it, and sold
it, and kept it in print. And the combination of that
effort with that of publishers and around the world translators
and just ordinary people not wanting their rights
as readers to be determined for them by the
Ayatollah of Iran meant that we were able
to resist this threat. And in the end, we did
get politicians involved, and they did negotiate
an ending to it with the Iranian government. But I've always felt very
proud and grateful to have been part of that collective
act of principle, if you like. And I hope that if
somebody else were in such a situation, that
we would all do that again. But I also hope that nobody
else is in such a situation. And one of the things that's
interesting about time having passed-- it's
now actually just over 25 years since the first
publication of "The Satanic Verses," which came out of
England in September 1988. One of the things
that's interesting about the intervening years
is how many of the people who were involved in protests
against the book at that time now say that they regret it. Some of them regret it
for tactical reasons. That's to say, they
felt it didn't work. They say, he just sold more
copies and became more famous, and it didn't help
the community. It backfired. Which is true. Other people have actually
internalized free speech arguments and believe that
if they have the right to talk about their
opinions, then other people have the right to
say things which conflict with those opinions. And so it's been an
interesting exercise, because I hope that that whole
arc of a quarter of a century reduces the likelihood that
these tactics would be used again against a writer
or artist, at least in the Western world. I mean, there are many writers
and artists in other countries who are under attack,
and not by any means only in the Islamic world. I mean, in fact, one of
the big areas of problems now, as you probably
know, is China, where attacks on literary
and journalistic freedom are very, very severe. Anyway, so it's an
exemplary tale, if you like. I mean, I also feel-- well,
I try to say in the book that when this began, it felt
like a bizarre, small, isolated episode. And I think now
that we know what we know about what has
happened in the last 25 years, we can see it as part of the arc
of the rise of radical Islam. And you can draw the
lines of connection from these initial attacks
on individual writers and journalists and so on
to the much larger attacks that we all know about. And at the beginning
of the book, I use the metaphor of Alfred
Hitchcock's movie, "The Birds." That when, in that famous scene
in the school playground when the first bird comes and
settles on the climbing frame outside the school
room, it's just a bird. It's just a bird sitting
on a climbing frame. It's only in
retrospect, when the sky is full of hostile birds, that
you begin to think, oh, yeah, there was that first bird. And I think it became, in a
way, the fate of "The Satanic Verses" and its
author and publishers to be the first bird. That was the beginning
of what became a storm. And that's why I think
the story of what happened to me and the people
around me has, if you like, a kind of larger resonance. And I hope if you read the book,
that you may feel that, too. I want to, just before I stop
and answer your questions-- one of the things-- if you're
by nature a satirist, if your default setting is
to send up people in power and to take things
apart and so on, it's much easier for
somebody of that tendency to know what they're
against than to know what they are in favor of. Because satire by its
nature is against things. It deflates pomposity. It exposes tyranny, and so on. It became very clear to me
very early on in this business that that wasn't enough. It wasn't going to be enough. That not just for
me to argue my case, but also, actually, for me to
survive the event, to come out the other end, I would
have to know not only what I was against,
but what I was for. And in this case,
what I was against was pretty straightforward. I mean, killing writers
because of books they wrote. I was against that. That was kind of
an easy question. But what are you in favor of? To ask yourself the
question, is there anything that you be willing to
sacrifice your life for? What is it? Is it worth your life
being in danger for this, and if so, why? And these are tough
questions to ask yourself when, in fact, you're
really in that situation. And I think I came out of
it with just first of all, a very much clearer, stronger
understanding of the value of free speech, of the
principles enshrined in the First Amendment, and
also a clearer and deeper understanding of what literature
could bring to that narrative. And I just want to read you
a few pages from near the end of the book which
talk about that. What do books have to do
with this insane world that we now inhabit? This deals with a
passage-- a moment in time which is just after the
9/11 attacks, really. In New York, which is
where I was living by then. The story of his little
battle was coming to an end. The prologue was passed,
and now the world was grappling with
the main event. It would've been
easy, after everything that had happened to him, and
after the enormity of the crime against this city, to succumb to
hatred of the religion in whose name these things were done,
and of its adherents, too. Anyone who looked
even vaguely Arab experienced some
of that backlash in those weeks and
months of aftermath. Young men wore t-shirts
reading, "Don't blame me. I'm Hindu." Drivers of yellow cabs, many
of whom had Muslim names, decked out their taxis with
flags and patriotic decals to ward off their
passengers' rage. But in this matter of wrath,
too, the city, on the whole, showed restraint. The many were not held guilty
of the crimes of the few. And he, too, refused anger. Rage made you the creature
of those who enraged you. It gave them too much power. Rage killed the mind. And now, more than
ever, the mind needed to live to find a way of
rising above the mindlessness. He chose to believe
in human nature, and in the universality of its
rights and ethics and freedoms, and to stand against the
fallacies of relativism that were at the heart
of the invective of the armies of the religious. "We hate you because
we're not like you." And of their fellow travelers
in the West, too, many of whom, disappointingly,
were on the left. If the art of the novel
revealed anything, it was that human nature was the
great constant in any culture, in any place, in any time. And that, as Heraclitus had
said 2000 years earlier, a man's ethos, his way
of being in the world, was his daimon, the guiding
principle that shaped his life. Or, in the pithier, more
familiar formulation of the idea, that
character was destiny. It was hard to hold onto that
idea while the smoke of death stood in the sky
over ground zero, and the murders of
thousands of men and women whose characters had not
determined their fates were on everyone's mind. It hadn't mattered if
they were hard workers or generous friends or loving
parents or great romantics. The planes hadn't cared
about their ethos. And yes, now terrorism
could be destiny. War could be destiny. Our lives were no longer
wholly ours to control. But still, our sovereign natures
needed to be insisted on. Perhaps more than
ever amid the horror, it was important to speak
up for individual human responsibility. To say that the murderers
were morally responsible for their crimes, and
neither their faith nor their rage at
America was any excuse. It was important at a time of
gargantuan inflated ideologies not to forget the human
scale, to continue to insist on our essential
humanity, to go on making love, so to speak, in a combat zone. In the pages of a
novel, it was clear that the human self was
heterogeneous and not homogeneous. Not one thing, but many. Multiple, fractured,
and contradictory. The person you were
for your parents was not the person you
were with your children. Your working self was other
than yourself as a lover. And depending on the time
of day and your mood, you might think of yourself
as tall or skinny or unwell or a sports fan or
conservative or fearful or hot. All writers and readers
knew that human beings had broad identities,
not narrow ones. And it was the breadth
of human nature that allowed readers
to find common ground and points of identification
with Madame Bovary, Leopold Bloom, Colonel [INAUDIBLE],
Raskolnikov, Gandalf the Grey, Oskar Matzerath, the Makioka
sisters, the continental [INAUDIBLE], the Earl of
Emsworth, Miss Marple, the Baron in the Trees, and
Salo, the mechanical messenger from the planet Tralfamadore
in Kurt Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titans" Readers and writers
could take that knowledge of broad based identity out
into the world beyond the pages of books, and use the
knowledge to find common ground with their fellow human beings. You could support
different football teams, but vote the same way. You could vote for
different parties, but agree about the best
way to raise your children. You could disagree
about child rearing, but share a fear of the dark. You could be afraid
of different things, but like the same music. You could detest each
other's musical taste, but worship the same god. You could differ strongly
on the question of religion, but support the
same football team. This was what literature
had always known. Literature tried to
open the universe. To increase, even if only
slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human
beings to perceive, understand, and so finally, to be. Great literature went to
the edges of the known and pushed against the
boundaries of language, form, and possibility to make the
world feel larger, wider than before. Yet this was an age in which
men and women were being pushed towards ever narrower
definitions of themselves, encouraged to call
themselves just one thing. Serb or Croat or Israeli
or Palestinian or Hindu or Muslim or Christian
or Bahai or Jew. And the narrow their
identities became, the greater was the likelihood
of conflict between them. Literature's view
of human nature encouraged understanding,
sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself. But the world was
pushing everyone in the opposite direction--
towards narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism, and war. There were plenty of
people who did not want the universe opened,
who would in fact prefer it to be shut down quite a bit. And so when artists went
to the frontier and pushed, they often found powerful
forces pushing back. And yet they did
what they had to do, even at the price
of their own ease, and sometimes, of their lives. All right. I'll stop there and see
what you have to talk about. Thanks. [APPLAUSE] MALE SPEAKER: Hello. Does anybody have a
question for Sir Rushdie? AUDIENCE: How concerned are you
that even though the fatwa was officially withdrawn
about 20 years ago, that someone will take
it upon themselves to nevertheless threaten
your life again? SALMAN RUSHDIE: I
don't know, none of you look very dangerous to me. I think I'm probably OK. No, I mean, truthfully, it's
been over now for longer than it went on. I mean, it really
is a long time ago. And one of the things we all
know about the world we now live in is that the
subject changes very fast. And last week's subject
is irrelevant this week. And something that
somebody really last thought about in 2002, you
know, is ancient history. And remember that a lot of
the people who were the most-- well, first of all, the
biggest danger, actually, was state sponsored. The biggest danger
was the danger emanating from the intelligence
department, ministries of the government of Iran. That was the real threat. Because up to a point, you
can look after yourself if there's somebody in the
street who doesn't like you. What is very
difficult is to deal with the apparatus
of a state when it's aimed against
an individual. And that, we really--
I mean, I can't really, without breaking all kinds
of intelligence codes, tell you why I know
this, but there basically was an agreement which
seems to have been upheld, where the Iranians essentially
called the dogs off. And the rest of it has
been-- the worst thing that's ever happened
to me is walking down a street in New York. A gentleman of
Indian origin like myself came up to me
wagging his finger, and he said, "I just
want to tell you that V.S. Naipaul is 10 times
as good a writer as you." And I said, "Well, you
must feel pleased now, because now you've told me." And he said, "Yes. I just wanted you to know." And then he walked off. And I thought, well, if that's
the worst I have to deal with, I can handle that. AUDIENCE: So you
mentioned bookstores as a rallying place
for a reaction to what was done to you. Obviously, independent
bookstores and bookstores generally are not faring
terribly well in this economy. On the other hand,
a lot of books are delivered by
means like Amazon that are basically
impossible or very, very difficult to attack in a
way that a neighborhood bookstore is not. Do you think things would
have unfolded differently? Are you concerned about what's
happening to bookstores as they are suffering more
competition online? Do you think things
would play differently? Are you concerned
about those things? SALMAN RUSHDIE: Well,
I mean, clearly, this is a time of extraordinary
transformation in the publishing industry. And a lot of that
is because of, first of all, the Amazon
model for delivery, and then the arrival of
e-books in a big way. Those two things
have transformed and are transforming
the industry. And I think there's
a lot to be said. I don't think it's a simple
yes no thing, you know? I mean, for example, the
existence of something like Amazon makes it almost
impossible to ban a book. I mean, I know, for
instance, in India, there's still restrictions
on the import of The Satanic Verses. But if you want to
download it to your Kindle, it will show up in an instant. And it makes it
kind of ludicrous that that official ban
on the hard copy book survives, when, in fact, it's
very, very easy for anybody who wants to to have
access to the book. So that's a good thing. I think with many--
and I'm not alone in saying that the problem
with the Amazon model is the endless
driving of the price downwards to the point
at which everybody's bankrupt except Amazon. And that's, I think,
a big war that's being fought in publishing
now about fair pricing. And in many ways, the antagonist
in that war is Amazon. So Amazon is sort of on
both sides of the fence. You know what I mean? And similarly,
ebooks-- you know, my view is I don't
care how people read as long as they read. I have no particular-- I
mean, I actually, myself, I'm old school enough to like
having a book in my hand. But if people want to read
it on an iPad-- I mean, I read on an iPad, too. If I'm traveling, I
tend to read on an iPad, because I don't want to
carry 20 books with me. And I think that's
completely cool. And there's also some
interesting evidence which shows ebook
sales plateauing. I mean, everybody thought it
was just going to go like that, and real books were
going to go like that. And that doesn't
seem to be happening. It seems to be plateauing
at somewhere around 30% of the industry. And a lot of
independent booksellers will say to me that they're
actually not doing that badly. That they're actually
still-- the book is an incredibly
persistent object. People like it. It's in many ways a
very high tech object. You can drop it in the water,
and it does not lose its data. You can do all sorts of things. It's a very resilient object. I once destroyed a computer by
spilling a can of Coke on it. And ever since then,
I've been a little contemptuous of computers and
how easily destroyed they are. Also, I noticed, for
instance, when my archive was being looked after
at every university, they had some of
the old computers. Here's supposed to be this most
modern technology, you know? But much of it is
already obsolete. What's a floppy disk? And was actually very
hard for them at Emery to retrieve information
from these old computers in a way that was usable. Well, you can retrieve
information from a book even if it's several
hundred years old. The technology doesn't date. So there's all sorts of
reasons why people just like the feeling of books. And I think, actually, they can
coexist with ebooks quite well, I think. There's also some evidence
that ebooks bring people into the world of reading who
would not go to bookshops. And the kind of
instantaneousness of being able to--
you see a book. You think, oh, that
sounds interesting. You push a button. You've got the book. That's very attractive. There is evidence that people
buy in more than one format. That people like me will
have the hard copy book, and then if you're
traveling, you don't want to carry
the thing around with you, so you download it. Sometimes vice versa. People will download a book,
and if they really like it, they will want to have the book. So this is just the
next revolution. Everything was
supposed to kill books. Everything. Movies were supposed
to kill books, television was
supposed to kill books. Every new technology
that's emerged is supposed to spell the death
of books, and none of it has. So I think it may
outlast all of this. When Apple is a
thing of the past, people will still be
reading paperbacks. So I'm OK about it. I mean, the thing
I most worry about is this price battle,
because there's a level at which publishers
can be profitable, writers could make a
living, and distributors-- whether it's Amazon or a
bookstore-- can also do well. And if you go below
that level, then yes. Amazon will be
fine, because it has the enormous gift of volume. Everything's going
through Amazon. So even if they're
making a dime on a book, they've got so many books
that it's going to be fine. But publishers will go bust and
writers won't be able to live. And so that's the
fight right now. And I hope it comes
out in a fair place. AUDIENCE: I have
a question here. SALMAN RUSHDIE: Yeah. AUDIENCE: Hypothetically
speaking, if you knew then what you know now about the
divided reaction to your work, what would you have
done differently? SALMAN RUSHDIE: OK
this is the question I've been asked most often in my
life, once a week for 25 years, at least. And at the answer
is, I would have written the same damn book. Because actually, I'm very
proud of The Satanic Verses. I don't know what it means to
say it's the best book I wrote, but I think it's, for me, a
very important book of mine. And I can't imagine my body
of work without it there. And also, you know,
writing books is a journey. Each book is a step on a road. I couldn't have written
the book after it without having written it. So it's difficult to say
there's five years of your life that somehow shouldn't
have happened. I also think what is nice now,
given that the storm has died down, is that people are finally
able to read it just as a book. Not as a kind of hot
potato or something. And we discover that lots
of people seem to like it. And also, a lot of
people realize-- which you wouldn't
know from what you read about it--
that it's funny. A lot of people read it and
say, who knew that it was funny? And the answer is
the reason nobody knew is that nobody told them. It's not a kind of gag
line kind of funny, but it's a comic
satirical novel. And what I think is
that, in my view, the opinion of
people who like it is at least as important
as the opinion of people who don't like it, especially
since the people who like it tend to have read it. And the truth is that if
you're a writer of my kind, you're trying to write
books that will last. You're trying to write books
that will endure, and hopefully endure longer than the author. And the only way that
books last-- the only way that books last is if
enough people like them. Books don't last
because of scandal, because scandal always fades. And if the only the
merit of the book was that it was
part of a scandal, then the book fades
when the scandal fades. Every book that's
lasted, say, 100 years has lasted because a
lot of people loved it. That's it. That's The only thing. And so my view is that in
the end, the people who like the book are the ones
who have the last word. It's because of their fondness
for the book that it survives. And so my view is, you
know, we had all the people who didn't like the book making
their noise for long enough. They had their turn. And now, maybe it's the turn
of people who do like it, and don't have to
make a noise about it. You don't have to march
down the streets of cities in order to say,
we love this novel. That tends not to
happen, regrettably. I mean, I'd rather see those
demonstrations, truthfully, but that tends to not happen. But I'm just happy that finally,
the book can be read as a book. It can have the
ordinary life of a book. And it took a long time to get
there, but I think we're there. AUDIENCE: Do you
feel that Google has had a positive or
negative impact on free speech around the world, or
perhaps no impact at all? And is there anything
that you'd like to see us do that could further
the cause of free speech? SALMAN RUSHDIE: Well, the
question of freedom of speech is that it's something that
has to be constantly defended, because it is, I'm sorry to
say, constantly under attack. And so there's never a moment
at which you think, OK, that's taken care of, you know? Because new attacks
bubble up all over the place with
many different hats on. I think it's very
hard-- and there's a question I try to
answer the book is that, was this a victory or a defeat? And I think that if you
look at the narrow focus of the particular attack on this
particular work and its author, then I think we
didn't do so badly. I mean, the book
is still in print. It's in print in whatever
it is, four dozen languages. And the author's still around. And so I think if you
look at the narrow focus, it doesn't feel like a calamity. I think we did OK. But if you look at
the broader spectrum, then it's much more difficult
to see this as a success, because I think there's no doubt
that it had a chilling effect. That people are
scared of approaching this kind of
material, because they are afraid of violent reprisal. And of course, there
have been other episodes in which there have
been violent reprisals. And so I think the
larger spectrum is much more problematic. That we seem to have entered
a very intolerant age. And again, yes, I think
Islam, or at least this particular
interpretation of Islam, is very much at the
forefront of that. But it's not by any
means only Islam. For instance, in
India now, there's a very intolerant
extremist Hindu right wing that is at
least as violent, at least as prone to mob law,
as anything that happened to me. So it's eternal
vigilance, you know? That's the thing. You have to fight every battle. That's the problem. And the problem of
fighting every battle is that very often, you
find yourself defending work that you don't like. You know, like
that idiotic video that was made somewhere on
this side of America which was done to provoke
a response, and I think got a much bigger response
than the maker expected. And it's a piece
of crap, you know? And there was a colossal,
very violent response around the world. Now, you find yourself
saying, on the one hand, it's a detestable little thing. But on the other hand, you have
to defend the rights of people to make detestable
little things, you know? And unfortunately, the free
speech battle often hinges on issues like that,
which-- you're not defending great work, you know? You're defending garbage. But there should be
freedom of speech for the makers of garbage, too. That's the problem. And it's just that it
seems to me the best way to respond to a piece of
garbage on YouTube is to say, there's a lot of
that about, you know? I mean, if you want
to find something on YouTube that will really
annoy you, it's there. And the way to deal
with it is just to say, well, that's
what there is on YouTube and get on with your day. Going about burning the
world down because there's a video on YouTube
you don't like seems to me to be
kind of not grown up. I mean, to give you a
parallel example, when the musical "The Book of
Mormon" opened on Broadway, the show's producers
invited some of the elders of
the Mormon church to come and see the show
right at the beginning. And they said that they
thought it was very funny, and they took ads in the program
saying, you've seen the show. Now read the real
Book of Mormon. And end of story. And that seems to
me to be-- I mean, sorry to be defending
the Mormon church, but that seems like
a grown up response. When there are all these fusses
about this or that cartoon that somebody doesn't like,
because it's disrespectful, I would say, what does a
respectful political cartoon look like? I mean, there's no such thing. The form itself
requires disrespect. So again, if you're going
to live in an open society, we just have to deal
with that, you know? I remember last year
in I can't remember which paper here--
some American paper-- there was a cartoon of the pope. Not this pope. The previous pope. The one who is now
called ex-Benedict. But when he was
still Pope Benedict, there was a cartoon of
him sitting at his desk in front of a desktop computer
with a few cardinals gathered around him, and on
the computer screen, there were pictures
of little boys. And the caption
said, "Yes, and then you just have to click on
the boy that you like best." Now, American newspaper,
pretty rude about the Pope. I mean, you may say,
reasonably rude about the Pope, but pretty rude. Did anybody run around
burning cities down? They did not. Because the nature of liberty
is that people must say things you don't like. It's very easy to defend the
freedom of speech of people you agree with-- of all people
whose opinions don't really bother you one way or the other. It's when people are saying
things that you really don't like that you discover
if you believe in free speech or not. And a lot of people
don't, it turns out, when it comes to that crunch. But it means that the
battle is very often about defending
the right of people to speak who are saying
things you don't like, because otherwise, other people
can say that you shouldn't have the right to speak,
because you're saying something
they don't like. And in the end, who
makes those judgments? Where do you draw those lines? It's impossible to do it. What is best is to
say let it all out. Let it all out, and
we'll deal with it. So I would say that's
the nature of the battle, and it never ends. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
