You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

This week, my guest is Salman Rushdie.

It's the second of two interviews.

And this week, you know, I want to talk to him about many of the elements that go into the crazy stew or jigsaw puzzle of his writing,

because there are so many things, and so many of them are dear to many writers.

The first of them that I want to bring up, I found a little book pamphlet-sized from

distributed in America by a university press. It's from the British Film Institute originally.

It's a book on The Wizard of Oz, the film that Salman Rushdie wrote. And children's books

and films, both, seem very central, you know, like a germination

point from which the Rushdie universe unfolds. Yeah, I suppose stories are where we start,

you know, we start hearing stories when we are very, very little, and we

hear them increasingly, we hear them in the movies as well as in book form. And I suppose the

stories that we start with, like the Wizard of Oz, you know, like Alice in Wonderland,

like the Arabian Night stories, which I heard as a kid, shape us, shaped me very profoundly. And I went on and on

writing, if you like, variations on them. So I guess it's all Dorothy's fault. I feel too

that if a book doesn't have magic in it, it's not that I won't read it or appreciate it.

But magic seemed the first thing.

Well, I think it is the thing that we learn as children.

...