Salman Rushdie has been to ... Tuftsie!

You have no idea how awsome it is to se an author you admire in the flesh. You fall in love with their words, with their images, their ideas. You construct their identities in you head. You know how they think, what they sound like, what they like to wear. Script on a page always gives the illusion of authority and truth and unbias. So, in a way, you idolize them. Then you see them. And the preconception is shattered 9 times out of 10. They are small, soft spoken, balding: just an ordinary person. But I don't find this discouraging. On the contrary, they are ordinary people, just like me.

So, as you've probably gathered, Salman Rushdie spoke tonight at Tufts. He's an amazing, sarcastically witty, socially conscious, little man and I loved him, albeit from afar. Below is my a list of tonight's highlights.


Paraphrases of Salman Rushdie's memorable quotes (tee hee):

It's great that you all would come listen to a writer speak. No writer should ever be allowed to do that, by the way.

About the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, it's important to note that ... one of us is dead. What's that saying? The pen is mightier than the sword? The lesson is, don't mess with a writer.

I think the reason there is so much tension between politicians and writers is because they are fighting for the same power: the power to describe the world to people.

People accuse me of writing fantasy or magical realism. But in truth, I tone down reality in my novels. Reality is actually much stranger than anything that can be made up. In what we consider to be ordinary life, there are these strange growths that cannot be figured out. What shall I call them? Bushes?

Girl: Earlier you read a passage suggesting that truth and integrity often come in conflict with one another and that in such situations integrity is given precident, do you think our present government values integrity over truth?
Rushdie: Well, I was being satirical. That is what us writers call a joke. Of course, I don't really think that integrity should be valued over truth.

As a fiction writer people often assume that what one is writing is an autobiography in disguise. All of my main characters, I think, have been very different from one another and yet people always assume that they are me. Which means, I must have led a very interesting life.


He also talked about more relevant things, such as his facination with boundaries and the ways in which they simultaneously include some people and exculde others, the ways in which power works, the importance of free speech, where the line should be drawn for censorship, religion, gender, etc. You'll have to excuse me, I am so in aspiring writer's heaven right now.