SOURCE: Rushdie, Salman, and Davia Nelson. “Salman Rushdie and the Sea of Stories.” American Theatre 20, no. 3 (March 2003): 26-40.

In the following interview, Rushdie discusses the inspiration behind Haroun and the Sea of Stories, recent adaptations of his work, and his creative process.

“Some artists are blessed with outrageous humor. Some artists are blessed with wonderful imagination. Some have extraordinary intelligence. Some have raw emotional power. And some seek in their work a kind of spiritual understanding of how the world works. It is extremely rare that those qualities are combined in one person.” So spoke Berkeley Repertory Theatre artistic director Tony Taccone as he introduced the novelist Salman Rushdie to the audience of a special Berkeley Rep event in November.

While Rushdie is indeed a consummate literary man of our time, his own much-publicized tribulations seem even more theatrical than the sprawling, lexicon-bending novels he's written (The Satanic...