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I Think Novelists Are In The Education Business, Really, But They're Not Teaching You Times Tables, They Are Teaching You Responsiveness And Morality And To Make Nuanced Judgments. And Really To Just Make The Planet Look A Bit Richer When You Go Out Into The Street.

-Martin Amis

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I Think Novelists Are

Martin Amis

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I Think Novelists Are In The Education Business, Really, But They're Not Teaching You Times Tables, They Are Teaching You Responsiveness And Morality And To Make Nuanced Judgments. And Really To Just Make The Planet Look A Bit Richer When You Go Out Into The Street.

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One Thing You Can't Help Noticing In South America And In Latin Culture, Generally, Is How Nice People Are. Although When I Went Back To Spain - My Mother Lived In Spain And Both My Brothers Lived There - After The Uruguay Trip, I Thought, "oh Great, Hispanic People." But They Weren't Nearly As Nice As The Uruguayans. They're Quite Proud And Pissed Off, The Spaniards.

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.

When Things Are Going Well, You Do Have The Sense That What You’re Writing Is Being Fed To You In Some Way. Auden Compared Writing A Poem To Cleaning An Old Piece Of Slate Until The Letters Appear. The Only Way You Could Reveal Your God Is Perhaps Under Hypnosis. It’s Sacred And It’s Secret, Even To The Writer.

Everyone Is Right Up There At The Very Brink Of Their Pain Limit.

Has It Ever Happened To You...? The Color Of The Day Suddenly Changes To Shadow. And You Know You're Going To Remember That Moment For The Rest Of Your Life.

Rest Of Your Life

Bullets Cannot Be Recalled. They Cannot Be Uninvented. But They Can Be Taken Out Of The Gun.

We Have A Huge Institution That Celebrates The Undistinguished, An Institution Which Is Nearly As Old As The Papists. It's Been Going On For Millennia. What Else Is A Monarchy But A Series Of Ridiculously Exalted Figures Who Are Not Necessarily Distinguished At All? In Fact, They Have A Rather Philistine Tradition. So Perhaps We Are More Vulnerable To It Than Other Countries.

It Is Quite An Achievement. People Of Liberal Sympathies, Stupefied By Relativism, Have Become The Apologists For A Creedal Wave That Is Racist, Misogynist, Homophobic, Imperialist, And Genocidal. To Put It Another Way, They Are Up The Arse Of Those That Want Them Dead.

I Would Say That The Writers I Like And Trust Have At The Base Of Their Prose Something Called The English Sentence. An Awful Lot Of Modern Writing Seems To Me To Be A Depressed Use Of Language. Once, I Called It "vow-of-poverty Prose." No, Give Me The King In His Countinghouse. Give Me Updike.

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.

It Sounds Schmaltzy To Say, But Fiction Is Much More To Do With Love Than People Admit Or Acknowledge. The Novelist Has To Not Only Love His Characters - Which You Do, Without Even Thinking About It, Just As You Love Your Children. But Also To Love The Reader, And That's What I Mean By The Pleasure Principle.

There's Chile And There's Uruguay, And No One Quite Knows Why Uruguay Is So Appealingly Selfless Because They've Had Their Terror And Their Revolution Like All The Rest. But Somehow, There's Something In Them.

He Was In A Terrible State- That Of Consciousness.

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.

America Is Proud Of What It Does To Its Writers, The Way It Breaks And Bedevils Them, Rendering Them Deluded Or Drunken Or Dead By Their Own Hands. To Overpower Its Tender Spirits Makes America Feel Tough. Careers Are Generally Short.

America Has Had Much More Respect For Its Writers Because They Had To Define What America Was. America Wasn't Sure What It Was.

Often It Doesn't Occur To You What Kind Of Novel You're Writing Until Quite Late On.

As Someone Once Said, Covers To A Novel Are Like Bars To A Cage. You Can Watch The Tiger, The Komodo Dragon, And Admire It - Its Heart, Its Severity. Even When They Carry Out An Ugly Act, It's Still Fascinating.

The Egotism Of People Who Are Eminent Without Being In The Least Distinguished And Somehow Feeling That's Their Due - That Seems To Me To Be A Peculiarly English Phenomenon.

I Sometimes Feel I'm A Sort Of Cult Writer, Rather Than A Mainstream Writer, In That Those Who Like My Stuff Like It A Lot, But The Appeal Is Not That Broad.

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.

Most Writers Need A Wound, Either Physical Or Spiritual.

Every 10 Years You're A Different Person, And The Really Great Books Evolve With You As You Get Older. They're Full Of New Rewards.

If You Feel You Have A Strong Constituency Among The Young, You Can Really Die Happy, Because The Great Unanswered Question, The Only Valid Value Judgment Is Whether You're Going To Last, And That Tells You That You Are, For A Bit At Least.

Unanswered Questions

You Know, I Wouldn’t Have Done This A Month Ago. I Wouldn’t Have Done It Then. Then I Was Avoiding. Now I’m Just Waiting. Things Happen To Me. They Do. They Have To Go Ahead And Happen. You Watch – You Wait… Things Still Happen Here And Something Is Waiting To Happen To Me. I Can Tell. Recently My Life Feels Like A Bloodcurdling Joke. Recently My Life Has Taken On *form* Something Is Waiting. I Am Waiting. Soon, It Will Stop Waiting – Any Day Now. Awful Things Can Happen Any Time. This Is The Awful Thing.

I Love The Working Class, And Everyone From It That I've Met, And Think They're Incredible Witty, Inventive - There's A Lot Of Poetry There. A Lot Of Rough Stuff As Well. What There Is, Too, Is An Awful Lot Of Expressiveness And Intelligence And Originality Down There. And A Lot Of Thwarted Intelligence.

Present-day Spain Translates As Many Books Into Spanish, Annually, As The Arab World Has Translated Into Arabic In The Past 1,100 Years.

You Get The Feeling That Childhood Does Not Last As Long As It Used To. Innocence Gets Harder To Hold On To As The World Gets Older, As It Accumulates More Experience, More Mileage And More Blood On The Tracks.

He Didn't Want To Please His Readers. He Wanted To Stretch Them Until They Twanged.

The Arms Race Is A Race Between Nuclear Weapons And Ourselves.

It's Not That You Get A Cliché And Then Wiggle It About Or Use Synonyms. You Don't Take An Ordinary Decorative Paragraph And Give It Style. What You're Trying To Do Is Be Faithful To Your Perceptions And Transmit Them As Faithfully As You Can. I Say These Sentences Until They Sound Right. There's No Objective Reason Why They're Right. They Just Sound Right To Me.

Bullets Cannot Be Recalled. They Cannot Be Uninvented. But They Can Be Taken Out Of The Gun.

...so In His Own Way Guy Clinch Confronted The Central Question Of His Time, A Question You Saw Being Asked And Answered Everywhere You Looked, In Every Headline And Haircut: If, At Any Moment, Nothing Might Matter, Then Who Said That Nothing Didn't Matter Already?

When Success Happens To An English Writer, He Acquires A New Typewriter. When Success Happens To An American Writer, He Acquires A New Life.

Cities At Night, I Feel, Contain Men Who Cry In Their Sleep And Then Say Nothing. It's Nothing. Just Sad Dreams. Or Something Like That...swing Low In Your Weep Ship, With Your Tear Scans And Sob Probes, And You Would Mark Them. Women--and They Can Be Wives, Lovers, Gaunt Muses, Fat Nurses, Obsessions, Devourers, Exes, Nemeses--will Wake And Turn To These Men And Ask, With Female Need-to-know, "what Is It?" And The Men Will Say, "nothing. No It Isn't Anything Really. Just Sad Dreams.

Oh Christ, The Exhaustion Of Not Knowing Anything. It's So Tiring And Hard On The Nerves. It Really Takes It Out Of You, Not Knowing Anything. You're Given Comedy And Miss All The Jokes. Every Hour You Get Weaker. Sometimes, As I Sit Alone In My Flat In London And Stare At The Window, I Think How Dismal It Is, How Heavy, To Watch The Rain And Not Know Why It Falls.

It's Good Fun To Create An Unpredictable Character. When He Comes Into The Room, I Don't Know What He's Going To Do - I Have To Find My Way.

Tremendous Interest In The Superficial Is Very Characteristic Of Cultures In Decline.

Characteristics

My Friendship With The Hitch Has Always Been Perfectly Cloudless. It Is A Love Whose Month Is Ever May.

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.

Sex Was Like Disneyland To Her: An Allotment Of Organized Wonders And Legal Mischief.

You Can't Be Up The Reader's Ass, As Many A Writer I Think Is - Cute As Hell, Ingratiating As Hell. But That's Not Loving The Reader In The Right Way. That's Toadying To The Reader.

Faith Is A Talent, And It Goes The Way Of All Your Talents. Getting Old Is The Subtraction Of Your Powers. Which Very Much Goes For Writing.

Tennis: The Most Perfect Combination Of Athleticism, Artistry, Power, Style, And Wit. A Beautiful Game, But One So Remorselessly Travestied By The Passage Of Time.

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.

My Life Looked Good On Paper - Where, In Fact, Almost All Of It Was Being Lived.

People Are Always Talking On Their Phones, Or Looking At Their Phones, Because They Don't Want To Be Alone With Their Thoughts.

Let Me Assure You That The Humourless As A Bunch Don't Just Not Know What's Funny, They Don't Know What's Serious. They Have No Common Sense, Either, And Shouldn't Be Trusted With Anything.

Money Doesn't Mind If We Say It's Evil, It Goes From Strength To Strength. It's A Fiction, An Addiction, And A Tacit Conspiracy.

Has It Ever Happened To You...? The Color Of The Day Suddenly Changes To Shadow. And You Know You're Going To Remember That Moment For The Rest Of Your Life.

Rest Of Your Life

Every Day, The Dispensing Of Existence.... Its Face Is Fierce And Distant And Ancient.

When I Hear About Some Sensational New Writer I Sort Of Think, Shut Up ... You've Got To Be Around For A Long Time Before You Can Really Say You're A Writer. You've Got To Stand The Test Of Time, Which Is The Only Real Test There Is.

I Want Incremental Improvements. There's The Record Of All The Revolutionary And Violent Change And Extremism In General - It's Dreadful.

You See Tragedy Requires Persons Of Heroic Stature. It Works On The Principle Of People Being More Than Humansuper-humanand Also Being Only Too Human. But There Just Aren't Many Great Figures Around Now, So The Tragic Mechanisms Can't Work.

I Would Say I'm An Ironist Not A Satirist. All You Do Is You Take Existing Tendencies And Crank Them Up, Just Turn Up The Volume Dial. Which Is A Technique Of Science Fiction, Apart From Anything Else.

Your Purpose When Driving Is Not To Arrive At Your Destination Safely Or Quickly. Your Purpose When Driving Is...to Impress Your Personality On The Road.

I Love The Working Class, And Everyone From It That I've Met, And Think They're Incredible Witty, Inventive - There's A Lot Of Poetry There. A Lot Of Rough Stuff As Well. What There Is, Too, Is An Awful Lot Of Expressiveness And Intelligence And Originality Down There. And A Lot Of Thwarted Intelligence.

I Think Novelists Are In The Education Business, Really, But They're Not Teaching You Times Tables, They Are Teaching You Responsiveness And Morality And To Make Nuanced Judgments. And Really To Just Make The Planet Look A Bit Richer When You Go Out Into The Street.

No Novel Has Ever Changed Anything, As Far As I Can See.

When Things Are Going Well, You Do Have The Sense That What You’re Writing Is Being Fed To You In Some Way. Auden Compared Writing A Poem To Cleaning An Old Piece Of Slate Until The Letters Appear. The Only Way You Could Reveal Your God Is Perhaps Under Hypnosis. It’s Sacred And It’s Secret, Even To The Writer.

Deciding To Write A Novel About Something - As Opposed To Finding You Are Writing A Novel Around Something - Sounds To Me Like A Good Evocation Of Writer's Block.

The Arms Race Is A Race Between Nuclear Weapons And Ourselves.

In The Concordance Of Nicola Six's Kisses There Were Many Subheads And Subsections, Many Genres And Phyla - Chapter And Verse, Cross-references, Multiple Citations.

When I Talk About The Pleasure Principle, I Don't Say There Is Only One Kind Of Pleasure, There Are Many Kinds Of Pleasure. Some Pleasure Is Difficult. It Should Be For The Reader As Well As The Writer. But It Has To Be Pleasure.

Present-day Spain Translates As Many Books Into Spanish, Annually, As The Arab World Has Translated Into Arabic In The Past 1,100 Years.

They Did More Than Take Our Youth Away. They Also Took Away The Men We Were Going To Be.

I Would Say That The Writers I Like And Trust Have At The Base Of Their Prose Something Called The English Sentence. An Awful Lot Of Modern Writing Seems To Me To Be A Depressed Use Of Language. Once, I Called It "vow-of-poverty Prose." No, Give Me The King In His Countinghouse. Give Me Updike.

The Thing Is That I Am A Member Of That Sad, Ever-dwindling Minority... The Child Of An Unbroken Home. I Have Carried This Albatross Since The Age Of Eleven, When I Started At Grammar School. Not A Day Would Pass Without Somebody I Knew Turning Out To Be Adopted Or Illegitimate, Or To Have Mothers Who Were About To Hare Off With Some Bloke, Or To Have Dead Fathers And Shabby Stepfathers. What Busy Lives They Led. How I Envied Their Excuses For Introspection, Their Ear-marked Receptacles For Every Just Antagonism And Noble Loyalty.

What Did Nabokov And Joyce Have In Common, Apart From The Poor Teeth And The Great Prose? Exile, And Decades Of Near Pauperism. A Compulsive Tendency To Overtip. An Uxoriousness That Their Wives Deservedly Inspired. More Than That, They Both Lived Their Lives 'beautifully'--not In Any Jamesian Sense (where, Besides, Ferocious Solvency Would Have Been A Prerequisite), But In The Droll Fortitude Of Their Perseverance. They Got The Work Done, With Style.

I've Always Said That The Big Difference Between South America And North America With Regard To The Native Population Is That In North America They Raped Them And Killed Them, And In South America They Raped Them And Married Them. The Mix Was Much Greater, And That Was Very Good.

The Thing Is That I Am A Member Of That Sad, Ever-dwindling Minority... The Child Of An Unbroken Home. I Have Carried This Albatross Since The Age Of Eleven, When I Started At Grammar School. Not A Day Would Pass Without Somebody I Knew Turning Out To Be Adopted Or Illegitimate, Or To Have Mothers Who Were About To Hare Off With Some Bloke, Or To Have Dead Fathers And Shabby Stepfathers. What Busy Lives They Led. How I Envied Their Excuses For Introspection, Their Ear-marked Receptacles For Every Just Antagonism And Noble Loyalty.

Well, My Father Kingsley Amis Was A Writer And It Seemed Natural To Start Writing In My Late Teens. I Think It Was Good That I Began When I Was Young And Bold And Foolish, Otherwise I'd Have Become Too Self-conscious And Aware Of The Weight Of Not Having Written Anything Yet.

I Say The Sentences Again And Again In My Head Until They Sound Right.

Again And Again

He Awoke At Six, As Usual. He Needed No Alarm Clock. He Was Already Comprehensively Alarmed.

Your Heart Becomes Gangrenous In Your Body When You Go Against Your Talent.

The Air Itself Was Ebony, Like The Denial, The Refutation, Of The Idea Of Light.

Because We Are All Poets Or Babies In The Middle Of The Night, Struggling With Being.

I'm Not Interested In Making A Diagnostic Novel Or A Concern. I'm 100 Percent Committed In Fiction To The Pleasure Principle - That's What Fiction Is, And Should Be.

My 12-year-old Daughter Said To Me, "enough With The Subtitles, Daddy, For Crying Out Loud." Because They Always Seem To Cloud The Issue Rather Than Clarify It.

I Would Say I'm An Ironist Not A Satirist. All You Do Is You Take Existing Tendencies And Crank Them Up, Just Turn Up The Volume Dial. Which Is A Technique Of Science Fiction, Apart From Anything Else.

I'm Afraid The Negative Things Are Always The Great Subjects. Failure Is Much More Interesting Than Success.

I Think Writers Are Excited By Stupidity And Bad Behavior, Generally.

For Both Of Us, I Think, It Had To Do With Our Weakened Power To Love. It Is Strange That Enslavement Should Have That Effect – Not Just The Fantastic Degradation, Not Just The Fear And The Boredom And All The Rest, But Also The Layered Injustice, The Silent Injustice. So All Right. We’re Back Where We Started. To You, Nothing – From You, Everything. They Took It From Me, It Seems, For No Reason, Other Than That I Value It So Much.

My Father Once Said There's A Correlation Between A Nation's Cuisine And Its People: England, Nice People, Nasty Food; France, Nice Food, Nasty People; Spain, Nice People, Nasty Food; Italy, Nice People, Nice Food; And Germany, Nasty Food, Nasty People. And I've Always Thought That There Must Be Something Terribly Wrong With The German Character - And That There Is, Really.

But Before We Face Experience, That Miserable Enemy, Let Us Have Some More Innocence, Just For A While.

All The Things We Value In Society Don't Mean Much In Fiction.

He Was In A Terrible State- That Of Consciousness.

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.

Screw-top Wine Has Improved The Quality Of Life By About Ten Percent, Wouldn't You Say?

Tennis: The Most Perfect Combination Of Athleticism, Artistry, Power, Style, And Wit. A Beautiful Game, But One So Remorselessly Travestied By The Passage Of Time.

I Don't Think I've Ever Been Particularly Scared Of Death - But Scared Of Dying, The Process. It Doesn't Seem To Be A Good Way Of Doing It.

Weapons Are Like Money; No One Knows The Meaning Of Enough.

Saul Bellow Says, Funny Enough, What French Think Of Your Work Is Tremendously Important. And It Is. It's More Than What The Italians, The Spanish, And The Germans Think. Somehow It's Still Got That Cultural Primacy. I Feel That Too: To Get Praised In France Is Better Than To Get Praised Anywhere Else.

The Universe Is A Million Billion Light-years Wide, And Every Inch Of It Would Kill You If You Went There. This Is The Position Of The Universe With Regards To Human Life.

What Did Nabokov And Joyce Have In Common, Apart From The Poor Teeth And The Great Prose? Exile, And Decades Of Near Pauperism. A Compulsive Tendency To Overtip. An Uxoriousness That Their Wives Deservedly Inspired. More Than That, They Both Lived Their Lives 'beautifully'--not In Any Jamesian Sense (where, Besides, Ferocious Solvency Would Have Been A Prerequisite), But In The Droll Fortitude Of Their Perseverance. They Got The Work Done, With Style.

September 11 Was A Day Of De-enlightenment. Politics Stood Revealed As A Veritable Walpurgis Night Of The Irrational. And Such Old, Old Stuff. The Conflicts We Now Face Or Fear Involve Opposed Geographical Arenas, But Also Opposed Centuries Or Even Millennia. It Is A Landscape Of Ferocious Anachronisms: Nuclear Jihad In The Indian Subcontinent; The Medieval Agonism Of Islam; The Bronze Age Blunderings Of The Middle East.

You Use A Different Part Of Your Heart With Girls.

The Children Of The Nuclear Age, I Think, Were Weakened In Their Capacity To Love. Hard To Love, When You're Bracing Yourself For Impact. Hard To Love, When The Loved One, And The Lover, Might At Any Instant Become Blood And Flames, Along With Everybody Else.

I Don't Think I'd Like Manhattan Anymore. My Mother-in-law Lives There, And You Go There. But I Like Looking At It From A Distance. It's A Fantastic Sight - Every Time, It Awes Me.

That Certain Snobbery Of Certainly The Parisian - Combined With A Complete Denial Of Your Historical Legacy, Is Just Awful. That's A Funny Thing About France. Saul Bellow Wrote Somewhere That He Saw Right Through The French. He Lived There. He Wrote The Adventures Of Augie March In Paris, And There's No One Better Than Him To Say What's Unbearable About The French.

It's Interesting When You're Doing Signing Sessions With Other Writers And You Look At The Queues At Each Table And You Can See Definite Human Types Gathering There.... My Queue Is Always Full Of, You Know, Wild-eyed Sleazebags And People Who Stare At Me Very Intensely, As If I Have Some Particular Message For Them. As If I Must Know That They've Been Reading Me, That This Dyad Or Symbiosis Of Reader And Writer Has Been So Intense That I Must Somehow Know About It.

I Think Novelists Are In The Education Business, Really, But They're Not Teaching You Times Tables, They Are Teaching You Responsiveness And Morality And To Make Nuanced Judgments. And Really To Just Make The Planet Look A Bit Richer When You Go Out Into The Street.

Addictions Do Come In Handy Sometimes: At Least You Have To Get Out Of Bed For Them.

You Use A Different Part Of Your Heart With Girls.

When The Past Is Forgotten, The Present Is Unforgettable

Insects Are What Neurosis Would Sound Like, If Neurosis Could Make A Noise With Its Nose.

So If You Ever Felt Something Behind You, When You Weren't Even One, Like Welcome Heat, Like A Bulb, Like A Sun, Trying To Shine Right Across The Universe - It Was Me. Always Me. It Was Me. It Was Me.

Across The Universe

You Never Can Tell, Though, With Suicide Notes, Can You? In The Planetary Aggregate Of All Life, There Are Many More Suicide Notes Than There Are Suicides. They're Like Poems In That Respect, Suicide Notes: Nearly Everyone Tries Their Hand At Them Some Time, With Or Without The Talent. We All Write Them In Our Heads. Usually The Note Is The Thing. You Complete It, And Then Resume Your Time Travel. It Is The Note And Not The Life That Is Cancelled Out. Or The Other Way Round. Or Death. You Never Can Tell, Though, Can You, With Suicide Notes.

One Of The Unseen Benefits Of Having Children Is That They Deliver You From Your Own Selfishness. There's No Going Back.

Standing In The Nordic Nook Of The Kitchen, I Can Gaze Down At The Flimsy-limbed Joggers Heading South Towards The Park. It's Nearly As Bad As New York. Some Of These Gasping Fatsos, These Too-little-too-late Artists, They Look As Though They're Running Up Rising Ground, Climbing Ground. My Generation, We Started All This. Before, Everyone Was Presumably Content To Feel Like Death The Whole Time. Now They Want To Feel Terrific For Ever.

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.

Because We Are All Poets Or Babies In The Middle Of The Night, Struggling With Being.

Dickens Is A Much Misunderstood And Mis-approached Writer, In That He Tends To Be Read, Particularly In The Twentieth Century, As A Social Commentator - Like The Great Victorians, A Realist In His Way. But He Isn't At All Like That. His Genre Is Actually More Like A Fairy Tale - Weird Transformations, Long Voyages From Which People Come Back Altered, Parental Mysteries, Semi-magical Twists.

Seeing The World Anew, As If It Were New, Is As Old As Writing. It's What All Painters Are Trying To Do, To See What's There, To See It In A Way That Renews It. It Becomes More And More Urgent As The Planet Gets Worn Flat And Forest After Forest Is Slain To Print The Paper For People's Impressions To Be Scrawled Down On. It Becomes Harder And Harder To Be Original, To See Things With An Innocent Eye. Innocence Is Much Tied Up With It. As The Planet Gets Progressively Less Innocent, You Need A More Innocent Eye To See It.

You Cannot Combine Being A Movie Star With Not Being A Movie Star.

We Have A Huge Institution That Celebrates The Undistinguished, An Institution Which Is Nearly As Old As The Papists. It's Been Going On For Millennia. What Else Is A Monarchy But A Series Of Ridiculously Exalted Figures Who Are Not Necessarily Distinguished At All? In Fact, They Have A Rather Philistine Tradition. So Perhaps We Are More Vulnerable To It Than Other Countries.

Everything Seems Fine Until You're About 40. Then Something Is Definitely Beginning To Go Wrong. And You Look In The Mirror With Your Old Habit Of Thinking, 'while I Accept That Everyone Grows Old And Dies, It's A Funny Thing, But I'm An Exception To That Rule.

The Children Of The Nuclear Age, I Think, Were Weakened In Their Capacity To Love. Hard To Love, When You're Bracing Yourself For Impact. Hard To Love, When The Loved One, And The Lover, Might At Any Instant Become Blood And Flames, Along With Everybody Else.

My Father Always Had Doubts About The Booker Prize, Although They Evaporated On The Announcement That He Had Won It.

All The Things We Value In Society Don't Mean Much In Fiction.

[on Stds] This Be Nature’s Way Of Recommending Monogamy.

Oh Christ, The Exhaustion Of Not Knowing Anything. It's So Tiring And Hard On The Nerves. It Really Takes It Out Of You, Not Knowing Anything. You're Given Comedy And Miss All The Jokes. Every Hour You Get Weaker. Sometimes, As I Sit Alone In My Flat In London And Stare At The Window, I Think How Dismal It Is, How Heavy, To Watch The Rain And Not Know Why It Falls.

My Belief Is That Everything That's Written About You Is Actually Secondary Showbiz Nonsense, And You Shouldn't Take Any Notice Of It.

It Was The Tiredness Of Time Lived, With Its Days And Days. It Was The Tiredness Of Gravity- Gravity, Which Wants You Down In The Center Of The Earth.

When The Past Is Forgotten, The Present Is Unforgettable

Well, My Father Kingsley Amis Was A Writer And It Seemed Natural To Start Writing In My Late Teens. I Think It Was Good That I Began When I Was Young And Bold And Foolish, Otherwise I'd Have Become Too Self-conscious And Aware Of The Weight Of Not Having Written Anything Yet.

One Thing You Can't Help Noticing In South America And In Latin Culture, Generally, Is How Nice People Are. Although When I Went Back To Spain - My Mother Lived In Spain And Both My Brothers Lived There - After The Uruguay Trip, I Thought, "oh Great, Hispanic People." But They Weren't Nearly As Nice As The Uruguayans. They're Quite Proud And Pissed Off, The Spaniards.

While Clearly An Impregnable Masterpiece, Don Quixote Suffers From One Fairly Serious Flaw--that Of Outright Unreadability.

Faith Is A Talent, And It Goes The Way Of All Your Talents. Getting Old Is The Subtraction Of Your Powers. Which Very Much Goes For Writing.

I Always Do My Draft In Long Hand Because Even The Ink Is Part Of The Flow.

As Someone Once Said, Covers To A Novel Are Like Bars To A Cage. You Can Watch The Tiger, The Komodo Dragon, And Admire It - Its Heart, Its Severity. Even When They Carry Out An Ugly Act, It's Still Fascinating.

All My Adult Life I Have Been Searching For The Right Adjective To Describe My Father's Peculiarly Aggressive Comic Style. I Recently Settled On 'defamatory.

Amis Is Acutely, Vibrantly Sensitive To The Different Registers Of Laughter. He Knows That It Can Be The Most Affirming And Uniquely Human Sound, And Also The Most Sinister And Animalistic One. He Understands Every Note Of Every Octave That Separates The Liberating Shout Of Mirth From The Cackle Of A Bully Or The Snigger Of A Sadist.

It Used To Be Said That By A Certain Age A Man Had The Face That He Deserved. Nowadays, He Has The Face He Can Afford.

Mere Fact Has No Chance Of Being Formally Perfect. It Will Get In The Way, It Will Be All Elbows.

How Incredibly Avaricious The Whole Operation Was, The Way They Made The Jews Pay For Their Tickets In The Railway Cars To The Death Camps. Yeah, And The Rates For A Third-class Ticket, One Way. And Half Price For Children.... It Was A Kind Of Exploration Of Evil. Just How Bad Can We Get?

My 12-year-old Daughter Said To Me, "enough With The Subtitles, Daddy, For Crying Out Loud." Because They Always Seem To Cloud The Issue Rather Than Clarify It.

When I Hear About Some Sensational New Writer I Sort Of Think, Shut Up ... You've Got To Be Around For A Long Time Before You Can Really Say You're A Writer. You've Got To Stand The Test Of Time, Which Is The Only Real Test There Is.

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.

The Egotism Of People Who Are Eminent Without Being In The Least Distinguished And Somehow Feeling That's Their Due - That Seems To Me To Be A Peculiarly English Phenomenon.

Dickens Is A Much Misunderstood And Mis-approached Writer, In That He Tends To Be Read, Particularly In The Twentieth Century, As A Social Commentator - Like The Great Victorians, A Realist In His Way. But He Isn't At All Like That. His Genre Is Actually More Like A Fairy Tale - Weird Transformations, Long Voyages From Which People Come Back Altered, Parental Mysteries, Semi-magical Twists.

Belief Is Otiose; Reality Is Sufficiently Awesome As It Stands.

My Friendship With The Hitch Has Always Been Perfectly Cloudless. It Is A Love Whose Month Is Ever May.

America Is Proud Of What It Does To Its Writers, The Way It Breaks And Bedevils Them, Rendering Them Deluded Or Drunken Or Dead By Their Own Hands. To Overpower Its Tender Spirits Makes America Feel Tough. Careers Are Generally Short.

Much Modern Prose Is Praised For Its Terseness, Its Scrupulous Avoidance Of Curlicue, Etcetera. But I Don't Feel The Deeper Rhythm There. I Don't Think These Writers Are Being Terse Out Of Choice. I Think They Are Being Terse Because It's The Only Way They Can Write.

Time, The Human Dimension, Which Makes Us Everything We Are.

It Was The Tiredness Of Time Lived, With Its Days And Days. It Was The Tiredness Of Gravity- Gravity, Which Wants You Down In The Center Of The Earth.

It Is Straightforward — And Never Mind, For Now, About Plagues And Famines: If God Existed, And If He Cared For Humankind, He Would Never Have Given Us Religion.

It's Becoming Clearer And Clearer To Me That The World Is There To Be Celebrated By Writers, And In Fact This Is What All The Good Ones Do, And That The Great Fashion For Gloom And Grimness Was In Fact A False Path That Certain Writers Took, I Think In Response To The Horrors Of The First Half Of The Twentieth Century.

Life Is Made Of Fear. Some People Eat Fear Soup Three Times A Day. Some People Eat Fear Soup All The Meals There Are. I Eat It Sometimes. When They Bring Me Fear Soup To Eat, I Try Not To Eat It, I Try To Send It Back. But Sometimes I'm Too Afraid To And Have To Eat It Anyway.

It Seems To Me That You Need A Lot Of Courage, Or A Lot Of Something, To Enter Into Others, Into Other People. We All Think That Everyone Else Lives In Fortresses, In Fastnesses: Behind Moats, Behind Sheer Walls Studded With Spikes And Broken Glass. But In Fact We Inhabit Much Punier Structures. We Are, As It Turns Out, All Jerry-built. Or Not Even. You Can Just Stick Your Head Under The Flap Of The Tent And Crawl Right In. If You Get The Okay.

Each Life Is A Game Of Chess That Went To Hell On The Seventh Move(...)

It's Tremendously Important How You Get On With The Other Sex. Your Life Record On That Is Incredibly Important. You Never Really Think About Any Of Your Other Achievements.

Who's Straight? I'm Not. I Am Bent Gouged Pinched And Tugged At, And Squeezed Into This Funny Shape. Each Life Is A Game Of Chess That Went To Hell On The Seventh Move, And Now The Flukey Play Is Cramped And Slow, A Dream Of Constraint And Cross-purpose, With Each Move Forced, All Pieces Pinned And Skewered And Zugzwanged... But Here And There We See These Figures Who Appear To Run On The True Lines, And They Are Terrible Examples. They're Rich, Usually.

Suicide Is What Everyone Young Thinks They'll Do Before They Get Old. But They Hardly Ever Get Round To It. They Just Don't Want To Commit Themselves In That Way. When You're Young And You Look Ahead, Time Ends In Mist At Twenty-five. 'old Won't Happen To Me', You Say. But Old Does. Oh, Old Does. Old Always Gets You In The End.

There's A Lot Of Anti-intellectualism In Britain. And The Writer's Views On This Or That Are Really Of Less Importance, As They See It, Than That Of The Man In The Street.

Sometimes I Feel That Life Is Passing Me By, Not Slowly Either, But With Ropes Of Steam And Spark - Spattered Wheels And A Hoarse Roar Of Power Or Terror. It's Passing, Yet I'm The One Who's Doing All The Moving.

I'm Not Interested In Making A Diagnostic Novel Or A Concern. I'm 100 Percent Committed In Fiction To The Pleasure Principle - That's What Fiction Is, And Should Be.

Probably Human Cruelty Is Fixed And Eternal. Only Styles Change.

I Sometimes Feel I'm A Sort Of Cult Writer, Rather Than A Mainstream Writer, In That Those Who Like My Stuff Like It A Lot, But The Appeal Is Not That Broad.

Very Broadly, Literature Concerns Itself With The Internal, Cinema With The External.

There Isn't What My Father Called The Cruising Hostility Of The English Press - Where They're Looking Around For Something To Attack. You Don't Feel That There's A Great Reservoir Of Resentment In The Press As You Do In England.

Is There Any Good Reason Why We Cannot Extend Our Multi-cultural Generosity To Include Another Dimension? That Of Time. The Past, Too, Is Another Country. Its Ghosts May Look Strange And Frightening And Slightly Misshapen In Body And Mind, But All The More Reason Then, To Welcome Them To Our Shores.

Gluttony And Sloth, As Worldly Goals, Were Quietly Usurped By Avarice And Lust, Which, Together With Poetry (yes, Poetry), Consumed All My Free Time.

He Was An Artist When He Saw Society: It Never Crossed His Mind That Society Had To Be Like This; Had Any Right, Had Any Business Being Like This. A Car In The Street. Why? Why Cars? This Is What An Artist Has To Be: Harassed To The Point Of Insanity Or Stupefaction By First Principles.

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.

Love Is An Abstract Noun, Something Nebulous. And Yet Love Turns Out To Be The Only Part Of Us That Is Solid, As The World Turns Upside Down And The Screen Goes Black.

Style Isn't Something Added On; It's Intrinsic To The Perceptions And The Way You See Life.

Sex Is Hard To Write About Because You Lose The Universal And Succumb To The Particular. We All Have Our Different Favorites. Good Sex Is Impossible To Write About. Lawrence And Updike Have Given It Their All, And The Result Is Still Uneasy And Unsure. It May Be That Good Sex Is Something Fiction Just Can't Do - Like Dreams. Most Of The Sex In My Novels Is Absolutely Disastrous. Sex Can Be Funny, But Not Very Sexy.

Sex Is Hard To Write About Because You Lose The Universal And Succumb To The Particular. We All Have Our Different Favorites. Good Sex Is Impossible To Write About. Lawrence And Updike Have Given It Their All, And The Result Is Still Uneasy And Unsure. It May Be That Good Sex Is Something Fiction Just Can't Do - Like Dreams. Most Of The Sex In My Novels Is Absolutely Disastrous. Sex Can Be Funny, But Not Very Sexy.

My Theory Is - We Don’t Really Go That Far Into Other People, Even When We Think We Do. We Hardly Ever Go In And Bring Them Out. We Just Stand At The Jaws Of The Cave, And Strike A Match, And Ask Quickly If Anybody’s There.

Unless I Specifically Inform You Otherwise, I'm Always Smoking Another Cigarette.

It's An Ancient Idea That The Leader Of A Democracy Should Not Be The Cleverest But The Most Average. That's An Arguable Point, But The World Has Decided Otherwise - Except In America, Where It Still Divides The Country Right Down The Middle.

Money Doesn't Mind If We Say It's Evil, It Goes From Strength To Strength. It's A Fiction, An Addiction, And A Tacit Conspiracy.

The True Manipulator Never Has A Reputation For Manipulating.

What Did Nabokov And Joyce Have In Common, Apart From The Poor Teeth And The Great Prose? Exile, And Decades Of Near Pauperism.

I Think Jorge Borges Said That When Argentineans Die They Turn Into Angels And Go And Live In Uruguay. But For The Rest Of South America, You Have To Say That It's Getting There - Becoming Civilized - And Will Get There. It's Had A Real Grit War In History. The Choice Between Those Societies Until Recently Was The Choice Between Tyranny And Chaos. Everyone Understood That. You've Got To Have A Strong Man, Or It's Going To Be A Mess.

We Hear About The Successful "texanisation" Of The Republican Party. And Doesn't Texas Sometimes Seem To Resemble A Country Like Saudi Arabia, With Its Great Heat, Its Oil Wealth, Its Brimming Houses Of Worship, And Its Weekly Executions?

It's Often Said Of American Politics That It's A Huge Juggernaut And The President Can Change The Direction By Two Or Three Degrees In Either Direction, But Not Much More. In Fact, I Think The President's Power Is Limited, Much More Than The Prime Minister In England.

He Awoke At Six, As Usual. He Needed No Alarm Clock. He Was Already Comprehensively Alarmed.

If You Feel You Have A Strong Constituency Among The Young, You Can Really Die Happy, Because The Great Unanswered Question, The Only Valid Value Judgment Is Whether You're Going To Last, And That Tells You That You Are, For A Bit At Least.

Unanswered Questions

To Idealize: All Writing Is A Campaign Against Cliché. Not Just Clichés Of The Pen But Clichés Of The Mind And Clichés Of The Heart.

Fiction Is The Only Way To Redeem The Formlessness Of Life

The Only Writer Who Gives Me Unfeigned Pleasure Is P.g. Wodehouse. And Even Him I Find A Bit Heavy. He Takes A Lot Out Of Me. Scratching My Hair, With Soft Whistles, With Lips Aquiver, I Frown Over Sunset At Blandings.

I Think A Lot Of People Who Read Fiction Are Interested In Subtlety. But They Wouldn't Like My Stuff. It's A Bit Too Violent For Many Tastes.

This (writing) Is The Love Of Your Life. It's What I Want To Do When I Wake Up. Nothing Feels So Absorbing, So Fulfilling.

More Will Mean Worse.

...so In His Own Way Guy Clinch Confronted The Central Question Of His Time, A Question You Saw Being Asked And Answered Everywhere You Looked, In Every Headline And Haircut: If, At Any Moment, Nothing Might Matter, Then Who Said That Nothing Didn't Matter Already?

I Hire Tea By The Tea Bag.

In Germany, They Were Very Interested In Talking About Their Past. I Respect That, And I Think They've Done Quite Well. It's Become A Kind Of Obsession, As It Bloody Well Should, When Compared, For Example, To France, Which Hasn't Done Anything. France Has Done No Work About Their Part In Transporting Eighty Thousand People To Their Deaths. They Are Still The Guy In The Leather Jacket With The Onion, Who's A Part Of La Résistance. In Fact, They Collaborated, Not Resisted.

No Novel Has Ever Changed Anything, As Far As I Can See. And The Great Satirists, Like Swift And Dickens, Tend To Write About Abuses And Injustices That Have Already Been Partially Corrected - You Write About It After It's Over.

It's Often Said Of American Politics That It's A Huge Juggernaut And The President Can Change The Direction By Two Or Three Degrees In Either Direction, But Not Much More. In Fact, I Think The President's Power Is Limited, Much More Than The Prime Minister In England.

Style Is Not Neutral; It Gives Moral Directions.

If Every Inhabitant Of A Liberal Democracy Believes In Liberal Democracy, Then It Doesn't Matter What Creed Or Colour They Are.

At Its Grandest, Political Correctness Is An Attempt To Accelerate Evolution.

When I See A Lot Of Young Faces In The Audience, It's Just Sort Of Sinking In How Important That Is. Because You're Old Enough Now To Identify Them Very Strongly As Being Young - Whereas Before, Of Course They Were Young, Because You Were Young. Now It's Not Like That.

Weapons Are Like Money; No One Knows The Meaning Of Enough.

Laughter Always Forgives.

My Literary Career Kicked Off In 1956 When, As A Resident Of Swansea, South Wales, I Published My First Novel, 'lucky Jim.

Steven Pinker Says, The Invention Of Printing And The Widespread Appearance Of Fiction - This Taught Empathy. If You Read A Novel, You're In Someone Else's Head, In Three, Five Different People's Heads. Suddenly, The Principle Of "don't Do Anything To Anyone That You Wouldn't Want Done To You" Becomes Real In People's Minds. That's A Fantastic Achievement If Fiction Is Indeed Partly Responsible For It. That's A Great Thing To Be A Part Of. In The End, Then, I Don't Know If Writers Have Legislated, But They Have Civilized.

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Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Spider Robinson

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