Martin Amis Quotes
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Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
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The doltish euphemism of conglomerate America.
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I'm not sure what the American convulsion at the moment is, but I get the impression that people have moved beyond political correctness there by now. But here it lingers, although much ridiculed.
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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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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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Our vulgar delight in American vulgarity.
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Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares - loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains.
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It occurs to you that Ulysses is about cliché. It is about inherited, ready-made formulations - most notably Irish Catholicism and anti-Semitism. After all, prejudices are clichés: they are secondhand hatreds . . . Joyce never uses a cliché in innocence.
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In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
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The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending ...
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Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.
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It would be inaccurate to say that John Fowles is a middlebrow writer who sometimes hopes he is a highbrow: it has never occurred to him to believe otherwise. There is a difference, morally.
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One of the historical vulnerabilities of literature, as a subject for study, is that it has never seemed difficult enough. This may come as news to the buckled figure of the book reviewer, but it's true. Hence the various attempts to elevate it, complicate it, systematize it. Interacting with literature is easy.
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My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'
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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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Bujak spoke of Einstein as if he were God's literary critic, God being a poet. I, more stolidly, tend to suspect that God is a novelist - a garrulous and deeply unwholesome one too.
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I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.
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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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Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.
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All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.
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'Einstein's Monsters,' by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.
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When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.
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Saddam's hands-on years in the dungeons distinguish him from the other great dictators of the 20th century, none of whom had much taste for 'the wet stuff'. The mores of his regime have been shaped by this taste for the wet stuff - by a fascinated negative intimacy with the human body, and a connoisseurship of human pain.
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The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.