Martin Amis Quotes
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Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
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You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.
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Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity.
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The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists - haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations.
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Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
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On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational - to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.
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When I wrote 'The Pregnant Widow' three or four years ago, I tried to reread my first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' because their young heroes are the same age. I couldn't finish it. It seemed to me so technically slapdash and weak.
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Vidal is determined to be a) in the thick of things, and b) above the fray. He knows everybody and he doesn't want to know anybody. He has had lovers by the thousand while doing 'nothing' - deliberately, at least - to please the other.
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Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
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Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.
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By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.
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We accept that there are legitimate casus belli: acts or situations 'provoking or justifying war'. The present debate feels off-centre, and faintly unreal, because the US and the UK are going to war for a new set of reasons (partly undisclosed) while continuing to adduce the old set of reasons (which in this case do not cohere or even overlap).
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Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
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I think it's a very confused culture. On the one hand, no one is better than anyone else; no one is prettier. On the other hand, everyone is completely obsessed by their looks and by how they strike the world. On the one hand, we're all equal; on the other hand, everyone's a superstar. It's all very irrational, like all ideology.
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It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.
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Does screen violence provide a window or a mirror? Is it an effect or a cause, an encouragement, a facilitation? Fairly representatively, I think, I happen to like screen violence while steadily execrating its real-life counterpart. Moreover, I can tell the difference between the two. One is happening, one is not.
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Just as a Philistine does not on the whole devote his life to his art, so a misogynist does not devote his inner life to women. Larkin's men friends devolved into pen-pals. Such intimacies as he shared, he shared with women.
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In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.
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Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
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Watching an adaptation of your novel can be a violent experience: seeing your old jokes suddenly thrust at you can be alarming. But I started to enjoy 'Money' very quickly, and then I relaxed.
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Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, 'Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.'
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The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.
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Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
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Our vulgar delight in American vulgarity.