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

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

Understanding the Quote: "only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and..."

This quote by Martin Amis reflects deeply on the theme of art. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Art, Lying, Rose, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Martin Amis interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Martin Amis

Martin Amis is celebrated for insightful thoughts on art and lying. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Art
Lying
Rose
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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.
Country
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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.
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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.
Taken
Waiting
Watches
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.
Believe
Men
Thinking
I Always Do My Draft In Long Hand Because Even The Ink Is Part Of The Flow.
Writing
Hands
Long
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.
Kissing
Six
Crosses
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.
Past
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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.
Priorities
Defense
Nuclear
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.
Doubt
Way
Kind
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.
Stuff
Sometimes
Mainstream
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?
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Soul
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.
Adventure
Historical
Legacy
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.
Jesus
Drinking
Cat
People Are Always Talking On Their Phones, Or Looking At Their Phones, Because They Don't Want To Be Alone With Their Thoughts.
Phones
Talking
People
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.
Important
Faces
Enough
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.
Perseverance
Wife
Style
I Would Never Write About Someone That Forced Me To Write At A Lower Register Than What I Can Write.
Writing
Register
I Can
In America, The Policeman Is A Working-class Hero. In England, The Policeman Is A Working-class Traitor.
Hero
Class
America
All The Things We Value In Society Don't Mean Much In Fiction.
Mean
Fiction
Values
[on Stds] This Be Nature’s Way Of Recommending Monogamy.
Way
Stds
Monogamy
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.
Country
Self
America
You Can't Sort Of Write The Novel As If You're Taking Dictation From Heaven.
Writing
Heaven
Novel
Mere Fact Has No Chance Of Being Formally Perfect. It Will Get In The Way, It Will Be All Elbows.
Perfect
Elbows
Way
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.
Book
Angel
Animal
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?"
Writing
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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.
Evil
Addiction
Mind
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.
Shadow
Bits
Ifs
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.
Mother
Thinking
Wicked
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.
Might
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.
Thinking
People
Caves
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.
Real
Thinking
Long
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.
Writing
Thinking
Choices
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.
Father
Writing
Thinking
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.
Country
Vulnerable
Tradition
The True Manipulator Never Has A Reputation For Manipulating.
Reputation
True Man
Manipulator
My Father Always Had Doubts About The Booker Prize, Although They Evaporated On The Announcement That He Had Won It.
Father
Doubt
Announcements
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.
Wall
Thinking
Glasses
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?
People
Feelings
Looks
Tremendous Interest In The Superficial Is Very Characteristic Of Cultures In Decline.
Culture
Superficial
Characteristics
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.
Principles
Fiction
Pleasure
Being Inoffensive, And Being Offended, Are Now The Twin Addictions Of The Culture.
Addiction
Culture
Twins
I Would Never Write About Someone That Forced Me To Write At A Lower Register Than What I Can Write.
Writing
Register
I Can
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
Feelings
Egotism
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.
Writing
Thinking
Choices
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.
Taken
Waiting
Watches
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.
Moving
People
Profound
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.
Personality
Purpose
Driving
We All Have Names We Don't Know About.
Names
Knows
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.
Running
Dream
Moving
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.
Real
Achievement
Empathy
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.
Book
Busy
Too Busy
When It Comes To Flying, I Am A Nervous Passenger But A Confident Drinker And Valium-swallower.
Flying
Aviation
Nervous
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.
Suicide
Thinking
Long Ago
I Want Incremental Improvements. There's The Record Of All The Revolutionary And Violent Change And Extremism In General - It's Dreadful.
Records
Want
Improvement
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.
Laughter
Book
Bully
It Is Terrible To See Someone Being Beaten Up By The English Language.
Language
Terrible
English Language
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.
Hands
Careers
America
I Say The Sentences Again And Again In My Head Until They Sound Right.
Writing
Sound
Again And Again
Very Broadly, Literature Concerns Itself With The Internal, Cinema With The External.
Cinema
Literature
Concern
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.
Father
Nice
Character
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.
Light
Sound
Want
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.
Father
Writing
Thinking
Never Content Just To Be, America Is Also Obliged To Mean; America Signifies, Hence Its Constant And Riveting Vulnerability To Illusion.
Mean
America
Illusion
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.
Writing
Eye
People
All Novelists Write In A Different Way, But I Always Write In Longhand And Then Do Two Versions Of Typescript On A Computer.
Writing
Two
Novelists
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.
Awards
Firsts
First Time
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.
People
Achievement
Arses
It Is Very Difficult, It Is Perhaps Impossible, For Someone Who Loves His Mother To Love The Woman Whom Your Father Left Her For.
Mother
Father
Impossible
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.
Mother
Father
Years
My Friendship With The Hitch Has Always Been Perfectly Cloudless. It Is A Love Whose Month Is Ever May.
May
Months
My Friendship
Every Writer Hopes Or Boldly Assumes That His Life Is In Some Sense Exemplary, That The Particular Will Turn Out To Be Universal.
Writing
Assuming
Life Is
Everyone Is Right Up There At The Very Brink Of Their Pain Limit.
Pain
Limits
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.
Perseverance
Wife
Style
The Satirist Isn't Just Looking At Things Ironically But Militantly - He Wants To Change Them, And Intends To Have An Effect On The World.
World
Want
Effects
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?
Heart
Two
Soul
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.
Thinking
President
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.
Writing
Abuse
Injustice
When The Past Is Forgotten, The Present Is Unforgettable
Past
Forgotten
Unforgettable
One Of The Unseen Benefits Of Having Children Is That They Deliver You From Your Own Selfishness. There's No Going Back.
Children
Father
Selfishness
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.
Time
Moving
Sparks
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.
House
Down And
Bleak
...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?
Guy
Might
Matter
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.
Shining
Trying
Across The Universe
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.
Genre Is
Long
People
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.
Fiction
Pieces
Love Is Blind; But It Makes You See The Blind Man; Teetering On The Roadside . . .
Love Is
Men
Blind
Present-day Spain Translates As Many Books Into Spanish, Annually, As The Arab World Has Translated Into Arabic In The Past 1,100 Years.
Book
Past
Years
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.
Rain
Fall
Thinking
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.
Writing
Heart
Mind
Belief Is Otiose; Reality Is Sufficiently Awesome As It Stands.
Reality
Belief
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.
War
Russia
America
Novelists Are Stamina Merchants, Grinders, Nine-to-fivers, And Their Career Curves Follow The Usual Arc Of Human Endeavour.
Curves
Careers
Novelists
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.
Fall
Firsts
Chaos
Probably Human Cruelty Is Fixed And Eternal. Only Styles Change.
Style
Fixed
Cruelty
Style Is Not Neutral; It Gives Moral Directions.
Giving
Style
Moral
I'm Afraid The Negative Things Are Always The Great Subjects. Failure Is Much More Interesting Than Success.
Interesting
Negative
Subjects
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.
Country
Average
Ideas
So I Am Lonely, But Not Alone, Like Everybody Else.
Lonely
I Am Lonely
Not Alone
...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?
Guy
Might
Matter
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.
Children
Thinking
Impact
Only In Art Will The Lion Lie Down With The Lamb, And The Rose Grow Without Thorn.
Art
Lying
Rose
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.
Loyalty
Mother
Children
Sex Is Hard To Write About Because You Lose The Universal And Succumb To The Particular. We All Have Our Different Favorites. Good Sex Is Impossible To Write About. Lawrence And Updike Have Given It Their All, And The Result Is Still Uneasy And Unsure. It May Be That Good Sex Is Something Fiction Just Can't Do - Like Dreams. Most Of The Sex In My Novels Is Absolutely Disastrous. Sex Can Be Funny, But Not Very Sexy.
Sexy
Dream
Writing
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.
Suicide
Thinking
Age
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.
Mother
Distance
Thinking
The Arms Race Is A Race Between Nuclear Weapons And Ourselves.
Race
Nuclear
Arms
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.
Blood
Long
Track
Addictions Do Come In Handy Sometimes: At Least You Have To Get Out Of Bed For Them.
Addiction
Bed
Sometimes
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.
Evil
Addiction
Mind
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.
Principles
Kind
Pleasure
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?
People
Feelings
Looks
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.
Doubt
Purity
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.
Writing
Way
Talent
It's Hard To Make Progress With Grief.
Grief
Progress
Hard
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.
Hands
Careers
America
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.
Writing
Talking
Age
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.
Suicide
Thinking
Age
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?
Country
Texas
Oil
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.
Country
Thinking
Privacy
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.
Mother
Father
Years
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.
Character
Mind
Stories
Weapons Are Like Money; No One Knows The Meaning Of Enough.
Weapons
Enough
Arms Race
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.
Running
Dream
Moving
Style Is Not Neutral; It Gives Moral Directions.
Giving
Style
Moral
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.
Married
Very Good
Native
My Life Looked Good On Paper - Where, In Fact, Almost All Of It Was Being Lived.
Paper
Facts
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.
Father
Style
Adults
I Think All Writers Have A Bit Of Genius In Them, And A Bit Of Talent. Genius Retreats But Talent Improves.
Thinking
Genius
Retreat
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.
Writing
Abuse
Injustice
Most Writers Need A Wound, Either Physical Or Spiritual.
Spiritual
Needs
Wounds
Everyone Is Right Up There At The Very Brink Of Their Pain Limit.
Pain
Limits
It Is Terrible To See Someone Being Beaten Up By The English Language.
Language
Terrible
English Language
Most Writers Need A Wound, Either Physical Or Spiritual.
Spiritual
Needs
Wounds
Novelists Are Stamina Merchants, Grinders, Nine-to-fivers, And Their Career Curves Follow The Usual Arc Of Human Endeavour.
Curves
Careers
Novelists
He Awoke At Six, As Usual. He Needed No Alarm Clock. He Was Already Comprehensively Alarmed.
Alarms
Usual
Six
The Air Itself Was Ebony, Like The Denial, The Refutation, Of The Idea Of Light.
Light
Air
Ideas
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.)
Eye
Tears
Cinema
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.
Sorry
Believe
Hypnosis
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.
Fear
People
Trying
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.
Book
Angel
Animal
Screw-top Wine Has Improved The Quality Of Life By About Ten Percent, Wouldn't You Say?
Wine
Quality
Screws
Weapons Are Like Money; No One Knows The Meaning Of Enough.
Weapons
Enough
Arms Race
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.
Teaching
Thinking
Novelists
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.
Country
Princess
Sleep
In America, The Policeman Is A Working-class Hero. In England, The Policeman Is A Working-class Traitor.
Hero
Class
America
When I Go Back To The Core Of My Childhood, My Cousin Lucy Seems Always To Be In The Peripheral Vision Of My Memories. She Is Off To One Side, Always Off To One Side, With A Book, With A Scheme Or A Project Or An Enterprise.
Cousin
Memories
Book
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.
Kings
Writing
Giving
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.
Light
Years
Inches
It's Good Fun To Create An Unpredictable Character. When He Comes Into The Room, I Don't Know What He's Going To Do - I Have To Find My Way.
Fun
Character
Way
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.
Book
Busy
Too Busy
Probably Human Cruelty Is Fixed And Eternal. Only Styles Change.
Style
Fixed
Cruelty
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.
Sunset
Hair
Giving
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.
Thinking
People
Caves
The Middle Class Is Doing Fine In Fiction. But It's Not What Gets Me Going. I Love The Working Class, And Everyone From It I've Met, And Think They're Incredibly Witty, Inventive - There's A Lot Of Poetry There.
Witty
Thinking
Class
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.
Priorities
Defense
Nuclear
Everything Seems Fine Until You're About 40. Then Something Is Definitely Beginning To Go Wrong. And You Look In The Mirror With Your Old Habit Of Thinking, 'while I Accept That Everyone Grows Old And Dies, It's A Funny Thing, But I'm An Exception To That Rule.
Thinking
Mirrors
Funny Things
When I Go Back To The Core Of My Childhood, My Cousin Lucy Seems Always To Be In The Peripheral Vision Of My Memories. She Is Off To One Side, Always Off To One Side, With A Book, With A Scheme Or A Project Or An Enterprise.
Cousin
Memories
Book
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.
Mean
America
Citizens
When Success Happens To An English Writer, He Acquires A New Typewriter. When Success Happens To An American Writer, He Acquires A New Life.
Typewriters
New Life
Happens
Laughter Always Forgives.
Laughter
Forgiving
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.
Men
Age
Faces
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.
Selfless
Revolution
Terror
Unless I Specifically Inform You Otherwise, I'm Always Smoking Another Cigarette.
Smoking
Cigarette
Like Fundamentalist Judaism And Medieval Christianity, Islam Is Totalist. That Is To Say, It Makes A Total Claim On The Individual.
Islam
Christianity
Medieval
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.
Witty
Thinking
Class
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.
Real
Novelists
Body
At Its Grandest, Political Correctness Is An Attempt To Accelerate Evolution.
Political
Evolution
Correctness
America Has Had Much More Respect For Its Writers Because They Had To Define What America Was. America Wasn't Sure What It Was.
America
I Hire Tea By The Tea Bag.
Money
Food
Cooking
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.
Beautiful
Games
Perfect
My Literary Career Kicked Off In 1956 When, As A Resident Of Swansea, South Wales, I Published My First Novel, 'lucky Jim.
Careers
Lucky
Firsts
Someone Watches Over Us When We Write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
Mother
Teacher
Writing
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.
Children
Love You
Character
All The Things We Value In Society Don't Mean Much In Fiction.
Mean
Fiction
Values
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.
Writing
Giving
Faithful
Sex Was Like Disneyland To Her: An Allotment Of Organized Wonders And Legal Mischief.
Sex
Wonder
Allotments
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.
Strong
Real
War
He Awoke At Six, As Usual. He Needed No Alarm Clock. He Was Already Comprehensively Alarmed.
Alarms
Usual
Six
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.
Mother
Brother
Latin
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.
Cute
Thinking
Way
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.
Light
Sound
Want
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.
Daughter
Clouds
Years
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.
Suicide
Writing
Hands
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.
Thinking
Dying
Way
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.
Artist
Car
Insanity
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.
Country
Princess
Sleep
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.
Earth
Want
Gravity
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.
Atheist
Mind
Atheism
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.
Writing
Character
Paper
Laughter Always Forgives.
Laughter
Forgiving
Novelists Don't Age As Quickly As Philosophers, Who Often Face Professional Senility In Their Late Twenties.
Age
Twenties
Novelists
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.
Past
Thinking
People
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.
Fall
Firsts
Chaos
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.
Suicide
Thinking
Long Ago
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.
Real
Advice
Stuff
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.
Heart
Ugly
Admire
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.
Sex
Thinking
Achievement
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.
Color
Shadow
Rest Of Your Life
My Belief Is That Everything That's Written About You Is Actually Secondary Showbiz Nonsense, And You Shouldn't Take Any Notice Of It.
Belief
Nonsense
Written
Religious Belief Is Without Reason And Without Dignity, And Its Record Is Near-universally Dreadful.
Religious
Religion
Atheism
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