Martin Amis Quotes
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No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.
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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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Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.
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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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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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PC is low, low church - it is the lowest common denomination.
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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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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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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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You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.
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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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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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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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Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
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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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All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.
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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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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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Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
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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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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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The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
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Our vulgar delight in American vulgarity.
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The doltish euphemism of conglomerate America.