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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.

-Martin Amis

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It Sounds Schmaltzy To

Martin Amis

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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.

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More Will Mean Worse.

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I Hire Tea By The Tea Bag.

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.

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.

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He Was In A Terrible State- That Of Consciousness.

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It Is Terrible To See Someone Being Beaten Up By The English Language.

English Language

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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Fiction Is The Only Way To Redeem The Formlessness Of Life

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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It Is Terrible To See Someone Being Beaten Up By The English Language.

English Language

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

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

When The Past Is Forgotten, The Present Is Unforgettable

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We All Have Names We Don't Know About.

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.

More Will Mean Worse.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Don't I Ever Do Anything Else But Take Soulful Walks Down The Bayswater Road, I Thought, As I Walked Soulfully Down The Baywater Road.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

It Used To Be Said, Not So Long Ago, That Every Suicide Gave Satan Special Pleasure. I Don't Think That's True-unless It Isn't True Either That The Devil Is A Gentleman. If The Devil Has No Class At All, Then Okay, I Agree: He Gets A Bang Out Of Suicide. Because Suicide Is A Mess. As A Subject For Study, Suicide Is Perhaps Uniquely Incoherent. And The Act Itself Is Without Shape And Without Form. The Human Project Implodes, Contorts Inward-shameful, Infantile, Writhing, Gesturing. It's A Mess In There.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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