Martin Amis Quotes
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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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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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I'd like to be remembered as someone who kept the comic novel going for another generation or so. I fear the comic novel is in retreat. A joke is by definition politically incorrect - it assumes a butt, and a certain superiority in the teller. The culture won't put up with that for much longer.
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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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One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction. I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled.
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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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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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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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When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.
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You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.
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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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Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
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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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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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What is this televisual mastery of Reagan's? It is a celebration of good intentions and unexceptional abilities. His style is one of hammy self-effacement, a wry dismay at his own limited talents and their drastic elevation.
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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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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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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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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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Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
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I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.
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Our vulgar delight in American vulgarity.
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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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For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don’t want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.