Salman Rushdie on Poetry, Being a Reader, and Going to the Movies
Part Two of Rushdie's Conversation with Paul Holdengraber
In part two of their conversation, Salman Rushdie and Paul Holdengraber discuss Christopher Hitchens’s prodigious memory, V.S. Naipaul’s self regard, and the joy of going to the movies. Listen to part one, here.
Salman Rushdie on Christopher Hitchens, poem jukebox...
Christopher had an incredibly retentive memory. Of the people I’ve known, Christopher and Martin Amis are the two people who really carry around an astonishing amount of poetry in their heads. And you could literally turn them on. You could point at Christopher and say, Shelley, and he would do like 20 minutes.
Salman Rushdie on the relationship between being a writer and a reader…
A lot of writers are big readers. Very often, when you’re writing your day’s work, something you write will remind you of something that you read. And the thing that you read shines a kind of light on the sentences that you’re writing. So I think it would be very hard to write without having read a great deal.
Salman Rushdie on what he’s writing on now…
Oh, I’m just trying on the beginning of the next novel. I actually do know where it’s going right now. Since the beginning of this year, I wrote—I don’t know what, 50, 55 pages. They were eventually written in order to try and create the characters that would show me what I was doing. And by the time I had written them, I understood what I should be doing, so now I’m writing it again with a greater sense of confidence in the story. But I’m really slow, it takes me ages.
Salman Rushdie on going to the movies…
I think I was lucky to be young at a time when world cinema was going through a period of great brilliance. I think it’s hard now, in the age of Netflix, to explain to people what it felt like when this week’s new movie was Pierrot le Fou, by Godard. And how in the week that followed that there would be a new movie by Fellini, and in the week after that, a new movie by Kurosawa. And the week after that a new Ingmar Bergman movie. And the week after that the new Bunuel movie. And these films that we now think of as the great classics of world cinema were the new movies.
