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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.

-Martin Amis

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Sex Is Hard To

Martin Amis

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

For Both Of Us, I Think, It Had To Do With Our Weakened Power To Love. It Is Strange That Enslavement Should Have That Effect – Not Just The Fantastic Degradation, Not Just The Fear And The Boredom And All The Rest, But Also The Layered Injustice, The Silent Injustice. So All Right. We’re Back Where We Started. To You, Nothing – From You, Everything. They Took It From Me, It Seems, For No Reason, Other Than That I Value It So Much.

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.

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

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.

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

Most Writers Need A Wound, Either Physical Or Spiritual.

Novelists Are Stamina Merchants, Grinders, Nine-to-fivers, And Their Career Curves Follow The Usual Arc Of Human Endeavour.

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.

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

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.

When Things Are Going Well, You Do Have The Sense That What You’re Writing Is Being Fed To You In Some Way. Auden Compared Writing A Poem To Cleaning An Old Piece Of Slate Until The Letters Appear. The Only Way You Could Reveal Your God Is Perhaps Under Hypnosis. It’s Sacred And It’s Secret, Even To The Writer.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

So If You Ever Felt Something Behind You, When You Weren't Even One, Like Welcome Heat, Like A Bulb, Like A Sun, Trying To Shine Right Across The Universe - It Was Me. Always Me. It Was Me. It Was Me.

Across The Universe

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Novelists Are Stamina Merchants, Grinders, Nine-to-fivers, And Their Career Curves Follow The Usual Arc Of Human Endeavour.

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

If You Feel You Have A Strong Constituency Among The Young, You Can Really Die Happy, Because The Great Unanswered Question, The Only Valid Value Judgment Is Whether You're Going To Last, And That Tells You That You Are, For A Bit At Least.

Unanswered Questions

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

Again And Again

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.

Faith Is A Talent, And It Goes The Way Of All Your Talents. Getting Old Is The Subtraction Of Your Powers. Which Very Much Goes For Writing.

I'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.

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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.

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

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

Let Me Assure You That The Humourless As A Bunch Don't Just Not Know What's Funny, They Don't Know What's Serious. They Have No Common Sense, Either, And Shouldn't Be Trusted With Anything.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I 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.

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.

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.

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

Characteristics

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

So If You Ever Felt Something Behind You, When You Weren't Even One, Like Welcome Heat, Like A Bulb, Like A Sun, Trying To Shine Right Across The Universe - It Was Me. Always Me. It Was Me. It Was Me.

Across The Universe

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.

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

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.

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

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

Most Writers Need A Wound, Either Physical Or Spiritual.

We All Have Names We Don't Know About.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Family And Friends

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This (writing) Is The Love Of Your Life. It's What I Want To Do When I Wake Up. Nothing Feels So Absorbing, So Fulfilling.

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

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.

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.

When Policemen Go To Prison In England, They Have As Bad A Time As A Pedophile.

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.

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

It's Hard To Make Progress With Grief.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Standing In The Nordic Nook Of The Kitchen, I Can Gaze Down At The Flimsy-limbed Joggers Heading South Towards The Park. It's Nearly As Bad As New York. Some Of These Gasping Fatsos, These Too-little-too-late Artists, They Look As Though They're Running Up Rising Ground, Climbing Ground. My Generation, We Started All This. Before, Everyone Was Presumably Content To Feel Like Death The Whole Time. Now They Want To Feel Terrific For Ever.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

You See Tragedy Requires Persons Of Heroic Stature. It Works On The Principle Of People Being More Than Humansuper-humanand Also Being Only Too Human. But There Just Aren't Many Great Figures Around Now, So The Tragic Mechanisms Can't Work.

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.

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.

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.

Who Would Want The Socialist Utopia? Especially If You Were At All Artistic - You Want All Those Inequalities, Because That's What Makes Life Interesting.

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

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.

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

Characteristics

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

When The Past Is Forgotten, The Present Is Unforgettable

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Policemen Go To Prison In England, They Have As Bad A Time As A Pedophile.

Let Me Assure You That The Humourless As A Bunch Don't Just Not Know What's Funny, They Don't Know What's Serious. They Have No Common Sense, Either, And Shouldn't Be Trusted With Anything.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

English Language

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

When 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.

More Will Mean Worse.

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.

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

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.

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

For Both Of Us, I Think, It Had To Do With Our Weakened Power To Love. It Is Strange That Enslavement Should Have That Effect – Not Just The Fantastic Degradation, Not Just The Fear And The Boredom And All The Rest, But Also The Layered Injustice, The Silent Injustice. So All Right. We’re Back Where We Started. To You, Nothing – From You, Everything. They Took It From Me, It Seems, For No Reason, Other Than That I Value It So Much.

Style Is Not Neutral; It Gives Moral Directions.

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

He Was In A Terrible State- That Of Consciousness.

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?

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

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.

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?

Style Is Not Neutral; It Gives Moral Directions.

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.

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

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.)

He Was In A Terrible State- That Of Consciousness.

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 Hire Tea By The Tea Bag.

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

We All Have Names We Don't Know About.

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

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.

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.

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