He said, however, that he prefers the novel genre to short stories, since although he admires story writers, his novels are but many short stories wrapped together to tell a larger picture—a style he says many great writers before him have followed.

“I’ve always thought that Shakespeare was a novelist, but that he was around before there were novels,” Rushdie said.

In closing, in response to a question about his role in the recent movie Bridget Jones’s Diary, where he played an arrogant author named after himself, Rushdie joked that his brief appearances surpassed that of stars Renee Zellweger and Hugh Grant.

“I felt I held the film together, although I thought Renee and Hugh were good too,” he quipped.

Rushdie said the part had been hard to play since it required him to portray himself as sneering and arrogant, two traits he normally lacks.

“I kept trying to be nice, but the director would yell at me ‘Sneer,’” he said.

Rushdie, a native of India, is the author of more than a dozen best-selling novels including The Satanic Verses, for which former Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini Rushdie condemned him to death in 1989 for its alleged attacks on Islamic religion. Rushdie went into hiding for several years after a reward of a million dollars was offered for his murder.

—Staff Writer Garrett M. Graff can be reached at ggraff@fas.harvard.edu