Celebrated India-born writer Salman Rushdie may be growing older and wiser but suggests he cannot help provoking people as it seems to be in his DNA, which takes him to "those edges".

Twenty years after Iran's former supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for his execution, the 61-year-old novelist still seems to be provoking people.

Asked why he provokes such dramatic reactions, Rushdie said he can't avoid it, as if it's somehow stamped on his DNA.

"I can't avoid it," he told the Daily Telegraph newspaper. "Something in me takes me to those edges".

"There's a quote by Robert Browning that I'm particularly fond of - "Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things." Something in me, not consciously willed, takes me to those edges," he was quoted as saying in an interview to the British daily.

Rushdie says he believes in pushing the boundaries as much as possible.

"Nothing of great interest for me is done sitting safely in the middle of the room. You want to push the boundaries as much as possible. But I suppose if you do that then people are going to push back," he reasoned.

Rushdie traced a strange coincidence between his books and his personal life. "But what's very strange," he says, "is that the two happiest books I have ever written have emerged from two of the darkest periods of my life." According to the controversial author, 'Haroun and the Sea of Stories' was written "at the worst point, which was the year after the fatwa".

"And in this case there was plenty of unpleasantness around, yet the book just got more and more joyful." 'The Enchantress of Florence' was written in "difficult circumstances", says Rushdie, at a time when he was in the throes of divorcing his fourth wife, Padma Lakshmi.

As for his latest book, 'The Enchantress of Florence', Rushdie says it has done terrifically well outside Britain, where it had a more mixed reception.

"I'm not the sort of writer who ever gets five out of 10 reviews. I tend to get 11 out of 10, or minus one out of 10. That's all right, though; it shows that people are having strong reactions," Rushdie says of himself.

Next month will mark the 20th anniversary of the fatwa by Khomeini.

"I know everyone gets hooked on anniversaries. I'm sure there will be stuff in the papers and I've heard that the BBC is making some stupid documentary just to remind us all over again," he told the British daily.

"All I'm hoping is that I can say to people, "Look, you've had 20 years of talking about this stuff, please can I have the rest of my life?" Rushdie, who now divides his time between London and New York, points out that the three cities he loved most have been targets of major terrorists attacks.

"I do think of Bombay as my hometown," the celebrated author says. "Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else. So, of course, I have been desperately upset by what has happened there".

"It's very strange that the three cities I have loved most London, New York and Bombay have been subject to major terrorists attacks in the last decade," Rushdie says in the interview to the British paper.