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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.

-Martin Amis

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It's Becoming Clearer And

Martin Amis

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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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

So I Am Lonely, But Not Alone, Like Everybody Else.

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

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.

I Would Never Write About Someone That Forced Me To Write At A Lower Register Than What I Can Write.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I Say, 'if I Had A Serious Brain Injury I Might Well Write A Children's Book', But Otherwise The Idea Of Being Conscious Of Who You're Directing The Story To Is Anathema To Me, Because, In My View, Fiction Is Freedom And Any Restraints On That Are Intolerable.

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

We All Have Names We Don't Know About.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Most Writers Need A Wound, Either Physical Or Spiritual.

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.

Kingsley Amis Was A Lenient Father. His Paternal Style, In The Early Years, Can Best Be Described As Amiably Minimalist - In Other Words, My Mother Did It All.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Style Is Not Neutral; It Gives Moral Directions.

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?

I Think All Writers Have A Bit Of Genius In Them, And A Bit Of Talent. Genius Retreats But Talent Improves.

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

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

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.

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?

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

The True Manipulator Never Has A Reputation For Manipulating.

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

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.

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.

I Say, 'if I Had A Serious Brain Injury I Might Well Write A Children's Book', But Otherwise The Idea Of Being Conscious Of Who You're Directing The Story To Is Anathema To Me, Because, In My View, Fiction Is Freedom And Any Restraints On That Are Intolerable.

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

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.

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

He Was In A Terrible State- That Of Consciousness.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I Can Imagine In A Century Or Two That Rule By Women Will Be Seen As A Better Bet Than Rule By Men. What's Wrong With Men Is That They Tend To Look For The Violent Solution. Women Don't.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You Use A Different Part Of Your Heart With Girls.

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

I Hire Tea By The Tea Bag.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

They're Always Looking Forward To Going Places They're Just Coming Back From, Or Regretting Doing Things They Haven't Yet Done. They Say Hello When They Mean Goodbye.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

America Is A Younger Country Than England, Obviously, And As Self-awareness Is Forming In America - Are We A Collection Of Immigrants, Are We A Load Of Italians And Germans And Jews And Brits And Irish, Or Are We A Country With A Soul And An Identity? - There Was A Subliminal Sense, They Knew That The Writers Would Be The Ones Who Would Answer Those Questions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

He Was In A Terrible State- That Of Consciousness.

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.

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 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.

America Is A Younger Country Than England, Obviously, And As Self-awareness Is Forming In America - Are We A Collection Of Immigrants, Are We A Load Of Italians And Germans And Jews And Brits And Irish, Or Are We A Country With A Soul And An Identity? - There Was A Subliminal Sense, They Knew That The Writers Would Be The Ones Who Would Answer Those Questions.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Laughter Always Forgives.

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 Man Sometimes I Wake Up Feel Like A Cat Runover. Are You Familiar With The Stoical Aspects Of Hard Drinking, Of Heavy Drinking? Oh It's Heavy. Oh It's Hard. It Isn't Easy. Jesus, I Never Meant Me Any Harm. All I Wanted Was A Good Time.

When It Comes To Flying, I Am A Nervous Passenger But A Confident Drinker And Valium-swallower.

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.

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

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

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

When We Read, We Are Doing More Than Delectating Words On A Page Stories, Characters, Images, Notions. We Are Communing With The Mind Of The Author.

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.

More Will Mean Worse.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

...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?

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.

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.

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

Fiction Is The Only Way To Redeem The Formlessness Of Life

I Think All Writers Have A Bit Of Genius In Them, And A Bit Of Talent. Genius Retreats But Talent Improves.

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.

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.

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.

More Will Mean Worse.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

When The Past Is Forgotten, The Present Is Unforgettable

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.

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?

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.

Love Might Have Expanded Her. But We Are Not All Of Us Going To Get Loved. We Are Not All Of Us Going To Get Expanded.

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.

It's Hard To Make Progress With Grief.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

You Use A Different Part Of Your Heart With Girls.

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

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.

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

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.

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

One Of The Many Things I Do Not Understand About Americans Is This: What Is It Like To Be A Citizen Of A Superpower, To Maintain Democratically The Means Of Planetary Extinction. I Wonder How This Contributes To The Dreamlife Of America, A Dreamlife That Is So Deep And Troubled.

Being Inoffensive, And Being Offended, Are Now The Twin Addictions Of The Culture.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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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