Choice Quote

From Sunday's NYTimes article on Salman Rushdie, Now He’s Only Hunted by Cameras:

Umberto Eco was seated at the center of a long narrow table, opposite Mr. Rushdie and Diane Von Furstenberg. He and Mr. Rushdie were to travel to Rochester and then return to New York to appear at the 92nd Street Y with Mario Vargas Llosa: a scaled-down literary version of the Three Tenors.

The three appeared in 1995 at Royal Festival Hall in London. “We said we were the Three Musketeers and now we meet again,” Mr. Eco said. For the recent panels, he chose to read from “Foucault’s Pendulum,” he said, because Mr. Rushdie had once ripped it in The London Observer: “Humorless, devoid of character, entirely free of anything resembling a credible spoken word, and mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts. Reader: I hated it,” Mr. Rushdie wrote in 1989.

“I picked it just in order to upset him,” Mr. Eco said, leaning back and smiling. He said he had not yet read Mr. Rushdie’s latest creation, or hardly anyone else’s, for that matter. “If they are different than me, I hate them, and if they are like me, I hate them,” he said.