"Over the years, Rushdie’s friends have marvelled at his ability to write amid the fury unleashed on him."

"Martin Amis has said that, if he were in his shoes, 'I would, by now, be a tearful and tranquilized three-hundred-pounder, with no eyelashes or nostril hairs.' And yet 'Victory City' is Rushdie’s sixteenth book since the fatwa.... During the pandemic, Rushdie... was already toying with an idea for another novel. He’d reread Thomas Mann’s 'The Magic Mountain' and Franz Kafka’s 'The Castle,' novels that deploy a naturalistic language to evoke strange, hermetic worlds—an alpine sanatorium, a remote provincial bureaucracy. Rushdie thought about using a similar approach to create a peculiar imaginary college as his setting. He started keeping notes...."

From "The Defiance of Salman Rushdie/After a near-fatal stabbing—and decades of threats—the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act" by David Remnick (in The New Yorker).

"He has lost more than forty pounds since the stabbing. The right lens of his eyeglasses is blacked over. The attack left him blind in that eye.... He speaks as fluently as ever, but his lower lip droops on one side. The ulnar nerve in his left hand was badly damaged.... I asked how his spirits were. 'Well, you know, I’ve been better,' he said dryly. 'But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad. As you can see, the big injuries are healed, essentially. I have feeling in my thumb and index finger and in the bottom half of the palm. I’m doing a lot of hand therapy, and I’m told that I’m doing very well.... There have been nightmares—not exactly the incident, but just frightening. Those seem to be diminishing. I’m fine. I’m able to get up and walk around.... It’s great to be back... It’s someplace which is not a hospital.... I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest yet, really.... I’ve simply never allowed myself to use the phrase  'writer’s block.' Everybody has a moment when there’s nothing in your head.... I’ve always tried very hard not to adopt the role of a victim... Then you’re just sitting there saying, Somebody stuck a knife in me! Poor me... Which I do sometimes think."