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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.

-Martin Amis

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Life Is Made Of

Martin Amis

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Again And Again

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.

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

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

English Language

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

Again And Again

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You Use A Different Part Of Your Heart With Girls.

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

It's Without Doubt My Main Subject. The Way Masculinity Can Go Wrong. And I'm Something Of A Gynocrat In A Utopian Kind Of Way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

No-one Is Going To Sit Down And Read Bleak House To The Family Any More, But They Can All Huddle Up Happily In Front Of Charles Bronson.

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

English Language

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

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.

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.

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

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

I 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The True Manipulator Never Has A Reputation For Manipulating.

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

The True Manipulator Never Has A Reputation For Manipulating.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It's 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.

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

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.

What Is The Only Provocation That Could Bring About The Use Of Nuclear Weapons? Nuclear Weapons. What Is The Priority Target For Nuclear Weapons? Nuclear Weapons. What Is The Only Established Defense Against Nuclear Weapons? Nuclear Weapons. How Do We Prevent The Use Of Nuclear Weapons? By Threatening To Use Nuclear Weapons. And We Can't Get Rid Of Nuclear Weapons, Because Of Nuclear Weapons. The Intransigence, It Seems, Is A Function Of The Weapons Themselves.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Characteristics

It's Hard To Make Progress With Grief.

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.

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

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William F. Buckley, Jr.

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