Background Image

...

In Her Final Months Princess Diana Was Being Shat Upon By The Tabloids -- Basically For Sleeping With An Arab. When She Died, These Same Papers Were Astonished By The Millennial Wave Of Emotionalism That Swept The Country ... One Paper Had A Print-ready Story About What A Slag The Princess Was, And They Had To Pull It At The Last Moment. It Was Replaced With An Image Of Diana As An Angel, Ascending To Heaven.

-Martin Amis

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

In Her Final Months

Martin Amis

...

In Her Final Months Princess Diana Was Being Shat Upon By The Tabloids -- Basically For Sleeping With An Arab. When She Died, These Same Papers Were Astonished By The Millennial Wave Of Emotionalism That Swept The Country ... One Paper Had A Print-ready Story About What A Slag The Princess Was, And They Had To Pull It At The Last Moment. It Was Replaced With An Image Of Diana As An Angel, Ascending To Heaven.

Views: 71535

Topic

More From Martin Amis

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

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.

All That Rejection From Republicans Has A Bit Of A Racist Element. It Was Very Necessary To Have A Black President, And It's Been A Great Thing. It Will Help, In The End, To Ease The Trauma Of Slavery And Civil War. The War Against Slavery Cost Almost 800,000 American Lives - That's How Strongly They Felt About It. And It's Not Going To Go Away In A Century.

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.

More Will Mean Worse.

All That Rejection From Republicans Has A Bit Of A Racist Element. It Was Very Necessary To Have A Black President, And It's Been A Great Thing. It Will Help, In The End, To Ease The Trauma Of Slavery And Civil War. The War Against Slavery Cost Almost 800,000 American Lives - That's How Strongly They Felt About It. And It's Not Going To Go Away In A Century.

The Argument, Now, Is About Whether Bolshevik Russia Was 'better' Than Nazi Germany. In The Days When The New Left Dawned, The Argument Was About Whether Bolshevik Russia Was Better Than America.

I Am Easily Moved To Tears And Rarely Survive A Visit To The Cinema Without Shedding Them, Racked, As I Am, By The Most Perfunctory, Meretricious Or Even Callously Sentimental Attempts At Poignancy (something About The Exterior Of The Human Face, So Vast And Palpable, With The Eyes And The Lips: It Is All Writ Too Large For Me, Too Immediate For Me.)

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?

In America, The Policeman Is A Working-class Hero. In England, The Policeman Is A Working-class Traitor.

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

In Her Final Months Princess Diana Was Being Shat Upon By The Tabloids -- Basically For Sleeping With An Arab. When She Died, These Same Papers Were Astonished By The Millennial Wave Of Emotionalism That Swept The Country ... One Paper Had A Print-ready Story About What A Slag The Princess Was, And They Had To Pull It At The Last Moment. It Was Replaced With An Image Of Diana As An Angel, Ascending To Heaven.

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

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.

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.

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.

Religious Belief Is Without Reason And Without Dignity, And Its Record Is Near-universally Dreadful.

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

Novelists Don't Age As Quickly As Philosophers, Who Often Face Professional Senility In Their Late Twenties.

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.

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

Style Is Not Neutral; It Gives Moral Directions.

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

If You Want To Know The Real Meaning Of Pornography, It Is The Utter Dissociation Of Love And Sex, The Banishment Of Love From The Sexual Arena.

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

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.

When The Sky Is As Grey As This - Impeccably Grey, A Denial, Really Of The Very Concept Of Colour - And The Stooped Millions Lift Their Heads, It's Hard To Tell The Air From The Impurities In Our Human Eyes, As If The Sinking Climbing Paisley Curlicues Of Grit Were Part Of The Element Itself, Rain, Spores, Tears, Film, Dirt. Perhaps, At Such Moments, The Sky Is No More Then The Sum Of The Dirt That Lives In Our Human Eyes.

Egotism Exists Everywhere, But It Has A Different Flavor In England, Where The Tabloid Culture Goes Much Deeper. It's Just The Indulgence Of Vulgarity, The Wallowing In Vulgarity. As With Everything English, There's A Sort Of Irony To It. They Write A Great Deal About These Trivial People Who Have A Certain Eminence, Always With A Bit Of, "isn't It Ridiculous That We Are Writing About This Person?"

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.

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.

America Still Is The Center Of The World, And What Happens In The American Economy Matters Everywhere.

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.

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

Again And Again

Richard's Bookshelves Weren't Alphabetized. He Never Had Time To Alphabetize Them. He Was Always Too Busy- Looking For Books He Couldn't Find.

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

Someone Watches Over Us When We Write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

These Are The Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These Are The Seven Deadly Sins: Venality, Paranoia, Insecurity, Excess, Carnality, Contempt, Boredom.

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

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.

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

While Making Love, We Often Talk About Money. I Like It. I Like That Dirty Talk

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.

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.

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

It's A Young Country And A German Only Feels Comfortable Being With The Masses. They Have Very Little Talent At Creating An Inner Life, Privacy. And I Think There Must Be Something Wrong.

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 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.

Someone Watches Over Us When We Write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

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

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

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

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.

Love Is Blind; But It Makes You See The Blind Man; Teetering On The Roadside . . .

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

Laughter Always Forgives.

It's Hard To Make Progress With Grief.

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.

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.

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.

The Trouble With Life 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.

It Is Very Difficult, It Is Perhaps Impossible, For Someone Who Loves His Mother To Love The Woman Whom Your Father Left Her For.

I Had My Yob Periods. Nothing Violent But Certainly Loutish. I Think It's Frustrated Intelligence. Imagine That If You Were Really Intelligent And Everyone Treated You As Though You Were Stupid And No One Tried To Teach You Anything -- The Sort Of Deep Subliminal Rage That Would Get Going In You. But Then Once It Gets Going, You Make A Strength Out Of What You Know Is Your Weakness, Which Is That You Are Undeveloped.

It's Hard To Make Progress With Grief.

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.

You Can Kill Time In A Number Of Ways But It Always Depends On The Kind Of Time You're Fighting: Some Time Is Unkillable, Immortal

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.

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

You Can Kill Time In A Number Of Ways But It Always Depends On The Kind Of Time You're Fighting: Some Time Is Unkillable, Immortal

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

Every Writer Hopes Or Boldly Assumes That His Life Is In Some Sense Exemplary, That The Particular Will Turn Out To Be Universal.

Laughter Always Forgives.

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.

Closure Is A Greasy Little Word Which, Moreover, Describes A Nonexistent Condition. The Truth, Venus, Is That Nobody Gets Over Anything.

We Live In The Age Of Mass Loquacity.we Are All Writing It Or At Any Rate Talking It: The Memoir, The Apologia, The C.v., The Cri De Coeur.

I Think It's Likely That The Civilizing Effect Of Literature Has Done Most Of The Work, And Still Continues To Do. Look At Steven Pinker's Book, The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It Proves Beyond Any Shadow Of Doubt That Violence Has Declined Dramatically Throughout The Centuries. There Are Various Reasons For It: The Rise Of The State, Leviathan, The Monopoly Of Violence, Children's Rights, Animal Rights. They're All Positive Signs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Never Content Just To Be, America Is Also Obliged To Mean; America Signifies, Hence Its Constant And Riveting Vulnerability To Illusion.

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.

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 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.

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.

Only In Art Will The Lion Lie Down With The Lamb, And The Rose Grow Without Thorn.

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.

When Communism Failed, It Wasn't A Good Idea That Had Gone Wrong, It Was A Bad Idea That Had Been Sustained With Incredible Determination In The Face Of All The Commonsense Arguments, And At The Cost Of 20 Million Lives At Least, In Russia, To Build The Socialist Utopia.

The Future Could Go This Way, That Way. The Future's Futures Have Never Looked So Rocky. Don't Put Money On It. Take My Advice And Stick To The Present. It's The Real Stuff, The Only Stuff, It's All There Is, The Present, The Panting Present.

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

Love Is Blind; But It Makes You See The Blind Man; Teetering On The Roadside . . .

I Think It's Likely That The Civilizing Effect Of Literature Has Done Most Of The Work, And Still Continues To Do. Look At Steven Pinker's Book, The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It Proves Beyond Any Shadow Of Doubt That Violence Has Declined Dramatically Throughout The Centuries. There Are Various Reasons For It: The Rise Of The State, Leviathan, The Monopoly Of Violence, Children's Rights, Animal Rights. They're All Positive Signs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The True Manipulator Never Has A Reputation For Manipulating.

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

Fiction Is The Only Way To Redeem The Formlessness Of Life

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.

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.

When The Past Is Forgotten, The Present Is Unforgettable

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.

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.

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.

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.

People? People Are Chaotic Quiddities Living In One Cave Each. They Pass The Hours In Amorous Grudge And Playback And Thought Experiment. At The Campfire They Put The Usual Fraction On Exhibit, And Listen To Their Own Silent Gibber About How They're Feeling And How They're Going Down. We've Been There. Death Helps. Death Gives Us Something To Do. Because It's A Fulltime Job Looking The Other Way.

The Argument, Now, Is About Whether Bolshevik Russia Was 'better' Than Nazi Germany. In The Days When The New Left Dawned, The Argument Was About Whether Bolshevik Russia Was Better Than America.

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.

You Know How It Is When Two Souls Meet In A Burst Of Ecstatic Volubility, With Hearts Tickling To Hear And To Tell, To Know Everything, To Reveal Everything, The Shared Reverence For The Other's Otherness, A Feeling Of Solitude Radiantly Snapped By Full *contact* - All That?

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

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

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.

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.

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

It's Been Said That Happiness Writes White. It Doesn't Show Up On The Page. When You're On Holiday And Writing A Letter Home To A Friend, No One Wants A Letter That Says The Food Is Good And The Weather Is Charming And The Accommodations Comfortable. You Want To Hear About Lost Passports And Rat-filled Shacks.

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.

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.

The Democratic Party Represents The American Brain, And The Republicans Represent Not The American Heart, Or Soul, But The American Gut. The Argument Between Brain And Bowel, Everywhere Else In The Free World, Has Been Decided Long Ago In Favor Of Brain. But Americans Still - It Still Divides The Nation, This Question, Here In America.

Like Fundamentalist Judaism And Medieval Christianity, Islam Is Totalist. That Is To Say, It Makes A Total Claim On The Individual.

Perhaps There Are Other Bits Of My Life That Would Take On Content, Take On Shadow, If Only I Read More And Thought Less About Money.

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.

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.

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.

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

Envy Never Comes To The Ball Dressed As Envy; It Comes Dressed As High Moral Standards Or Distaste For Materialism.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

...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?

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.

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?

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.

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

The Uruguayans Have A Sort Of Purity. I Don't Know Where They Got It, And I Doubt Even If They Know From Where They Got It. Perhaps They Didn't Kill Off Their Major Population.

I Hire Tea By The Tea Bag.

He Was In A Terrible State- That Of Consciousness.

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

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.

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.

People Look At Fame And Feel Deprived If They Haven't Got It, Feeling That This Is A Basic, Almost A Human Right, A Civil Right. And Also Feel The Same Way About Wealth, I Suppose - Why Haven't I Got It?

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

He Was In A Terrible State- That Of Consciousness.

Writers Spend Too Much Time Among Dead Things. I Thought That Was Profound And Actually True, That You're Trying To Pump Life Into Something That Is Inanimate. You See What A Sort Of Audacious Thing It Is To Move These Sort Of Imaginary People Around In A Very Stylized And Patterned World.

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

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

Since It Is No Longer Permissible To Disparage Any Single Faith Or Creed, Let Us Start Disparaging All Of Them... A Religion Is A Belief System With No Basis In Reality Whatever. Religious Belief Is Without Reason And Without Dignity, And Its Record Is Near-universally Dreadful.

Don't Dumb Down; Always Write For Your Top Five Percent Of Readers.

Language Leads A Double Life - And So Does The Novelist. You Chat With Family And Friends, You Attend To Your Correspondence, You Consult Menus And Shopping Lists, You Observe Road Signs, And So On. Then You Enter Your Study, Where Language Exists In Quite Another Form - As The Stuff Of Patterned Artifice.

Family And Friends

Vidal Gives The Impression Of Believing That The Entire Heterosexual Edifice - Registry Offices, 'romeo And Juliet,' The Disposable Diaper - Is Just A Sorry Story Of Self-hypnosis And Mass Hysteria: A Hoax, A Racket, Or Sheer Propaganda.

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

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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?

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.

In My Experience Of Fights And Fighting, It Is Invariably The Aggressor Who Keeps Getting Everything Wrong.

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.

I Had My Yob Periods. Nothing Violent But Certainly Loutish. I Think It's Frustrated Intelligence. Imagine That If You Were Really Intelligent And Everyone Treated You As Though You Were Stupid And No One Tried To Teach You Anything -- The Sort Of Deep Subliminal Rage That Would Get Going In You. But Then Once It Gets Going, You Make A Strength Out Of What You Know Is Your Weakness, Which Is That You Are Undeveloped.

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.

Pat Robertson At A National Convention, Equipped With Delegates, Certainly Remains A Terrible Sight. He Is A Charlatan Of Chaucerian Dimensions.

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.

All Novelists Write In A Different Way, But I Always Write In Longhand And Then Do Two Versions Of Typescript On A Computer.

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.

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.

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.

When You’ve Lost All Your Play, Guess What Love Becomes. Work. Work That Gets Harder Every Hour.

Since It Is No Longer Permissible To Disparage Any Single Faith Or Creed, Let Us Start Disparaging All Of Them... A Religion Is A Belief System With No Basis In Reality Whatever. Religious Belief Is Without Reason And Without Dignity, And Its Record Is Near-universally Dreadful.

The First Thing That Distinguishes A Writer Is That He Is Most Alive When Alone.

We All Have Names We Don't Know About.

You Can't Sort Of Write The Novel As If You're Taking Dictation From Heaven.

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.

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

People? People Are Chaotic Quiddities Living In One Cave Each. They Pass The Hours In Amorous Grudge And Playback And Thought Experiment. At The Campfire They Put The Usual Fraction On Exhibit, And Listen To Their Own Silent Gibber About How They're Feeling And How They're Going Down. We've Been There. Death Helps. Death Gives Us Something To Do. Because It's A Fulltime Job Looking The Other Way.

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

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.

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.

The Trouble With Life 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.

The First Thing That Distinguishes A Writer Is That He Is Most Alive When Alone.

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.

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.

Every Writer Hopes Or Boldly Assumes That His Life Is In Some Sense Exemplary, That The Particular Will Turn Out To Be Universal.

Trending Author

Warren Cuccurullo

Monique Lhuillier

Category