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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.
-Martin Amis
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The Literary Interview Won't

Martin Amis
...
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.

Understanding the Quote: "the literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. far..."

This quote by Martin Amis reflects deeply on the theme of interviews. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Interviews, 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 interviews and motivation. 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
Interviews
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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.
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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.
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Someone Watches Over Us When We Write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
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Like Fundamentalist Judaism And Medieval Christianity, Islam Is Totalist. That Is To Say, It Makes A Total Claim On The Individual.
Islam
Christianity
Medieval
In America, The Policeman Is A Working-class Hero. In England, The Policeman Is A Working-class Traitor.
Hero
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My Life Looked Good On Paper - Where, In Fact, Almost All Of It Was Being Lived.
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Never Content Just To Be, America Is Also Obliged To Mean; America Signifies, Hence Its Constant And Riveting Vulnerability To Illusion.
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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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Don't Dumb Down; Always Write For Your Top Five Percent Of Readers.
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My Father Always Had Doubts About The Booker Prize, Although They Evaporated On The Announcement That He Had Won It.
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They Did More Than Take Our Youth Away. They Also Took Away The Men We Were Going To Be.
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I'm Afraid The Negative Things Are Always The Great Subjects. Failure Is Much More Interesting Than Success.
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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.
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At Its Grandest, Political Correctness Is An Attempt To Accelerate Evolution.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Pat Robertson At A National Convention, Equipped With Delegates, Certainly Remains A Terrible Sight. He Is A Charlatan Of Chaucerian Dimensions.
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Screw-top Wine Has Improved The Quality Of Life By About Ten Percent, Wouldn't You Say?
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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.
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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.
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Deciding To Write A Novel About Something - As Opposed To Finding You Are Writing A Novel Around Something - Sounds To Me Like A Good Evocation Of Writer's Block.
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[on Stds] This Be Nature’s Way Of Recommending Monogamy.
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Mother
Teacher
Writing
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Careers
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Pieces
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Sorry
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Hypnosis
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Twists
Looks
Fluidity
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Writing
Eye
People
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Mother
Brother
Latin
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.
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Want
Effects
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
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Records
Want
Improvement
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Looks
People? People Are Chaotic Quiddities Living In One Cave Each. They Pass The Hours In Amorous Grudge And Playback And Thought Experiment. At The Campfire They Put The Usual Fraction On Exhibit, And Listen To Their Own Silent Gibber About How They're Feeling And How They're Going Down. We've Been There. Death Helps. Death Gives Us Something To Do. Because It's A Fulltime Job Looking The Other Way.
Jobs
People
Giving
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
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.
Humor
Common Sense
Serious
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Novel
I Can
It Is Terrible To See Someone Being Beaten Up By The English Language.
Language
Terrible
English Language
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
Most Writers Need A Wound, Either Physical Or Spiritual.
Spiritual
Needs
Wounds
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.
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Want
Gravity
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.
Writing
Hypnosis
Secret
I Hire Tea By The Tea Bag.
Money
Food
Cooking
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
Everyone Is Right Up There At The Very Brink Of Their Pain Limit.
Pain
Limits
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Running
New York
Artist
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
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.
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Angel
Animal
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
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
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
Because We Are All Poets Or Babies In The Middle Of The Night, Struggling With Being.
Baby
Struggle
Night
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
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Negative
Subjects
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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People
Interesting
Very Broadly, Literature Concerns Itself With The Internal, Cinema With The External.
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Literature
Concern
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
I Always Do My Draft In Long Hand Because Even The Ink Is Part Of The Flow.
Writing
Hands
Long
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.
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Dream
Moving
The Arms Race Is A Race Between Nuclear Weapons And Ourselves.
Race
Nuclear
Arms
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 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
Time
Fighting
Numbers
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
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
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
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.
War
Rejection
Black
I Hire Tea By The Tea Bag.
Money
Food
Cooking
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
Novelists Don't Age As Quickly As Philosophers, Who Often Face Professional Senility In Their Late Twenties.
Age
Twenties
Novelists
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
While Clearly An Impregnable Masterpiece, Don Quixote Suffers From One Fairly Serious Flaw--that Of Outright Unreadability.
Suffering
Serious
Flaws
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
Every Day, The Dispensing Of Existence.... Its Face Is Fierce And Distant And Ancient.
Faces
Fierce
Ancient
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.
Sex
Real
Want
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.
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Long
People
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.
War
Rejection
Black
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
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
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
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
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
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
Envy Never Comes To The Ball Dressed As Envy; It Comes Dressed As High Moral Standards Or Distaste For Materialism.
Envy
Balls
Moral
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
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
My Friendship With The Hitch Has Always Been Perfectly Cloudless. It Is A Love Whose Month Is Ever May.
May
Months
My Friendship
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
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
More Will Mean Worse.
Mean
Conflict
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.
Sex
Real
Want
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
While Making Love, We Often Talk About Money. I Like It. I Like That Dirty Talk
Dirty
Making Love
Dirty Talk
When It Comes To Flying, I Am A Nervous Passenger But A Confident Drinker And Valium-swallower.
Flying
Aviation
Nervous
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.
Determination
Russia
Ideas
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.
Love
Black
World
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
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 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
I Think All Writers Have A Bit Of Genius In Them, And A Bit Of Talent. Genius Retreats But Talent Improves.
Thinking
Genius
Retreat
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.
Interesting
Want
Artistic
He Awoke At Six, As Usual. He Needed No Alarm Clock. He Was Already Comprehensively Alarmed.
Alarms
Usual
Six
If Every Inhabitant Of A Liberal Democracy Believes In Liberal Democracy, Then It Doesn't Matter What Creed Or Colour They Are.
Believe
Democracy
Matter
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
Since It Is No Longer Permissible To Disparage Any Single Faith Or Creed, Let Us Start Disparaging All Of Them... A Religion Is A Belief System With No Basis In Reality Whatever. Religious Belief Is Without Reason And Without Dignity, And Its Record Is Near-universally Dreadful.
Religious
Reality
Atheism
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.
Men
Two
Looks
When It Comes To Flying, I Am A Nervous Passenger But A Confident Drinker And Valium-swallower.
Flying
Aviation
Nervous
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
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
Because We Are All Poets Or Babies In The Middle Of The Night, Struggling With Being.
Baby
Struggle
Night
...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
Addictions Do Come In Handy Sometimes: At Least You Have To Get Out Of Bed For Them.
Addiction
Bed
Sometimes
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
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
Style Isn't Something Added On; It's Intrinsic To The Perceptions And The Way You See Life.
Perception
Style
Way
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
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.
People
Tragedy
Principles
I Think Writers Are Excited By Stupidity And Bad Behavior, Generally.
Thinking
Stupidity
Excited
Being Inoffensive, And Being Offended, Are Now The Twin Addictions Of The Culture.
Addiction
Culture
Twins
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.
Thinking
People
Fiction
Style Isn't Something Added On; It's Intrinsic To The Perceptions And The Way You See Life.
Perception
Style
Way
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
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
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.
Strong
Unanswered Questions
Lasts
Everyone Is Right Up There At The Very Brink Of Their Pain Limit.
Pain
Limits
Never Content Just To Be, America Is Also Obliged To Mean; America Signifies, Hence Its Constant And Riveting Vulnerability To Illusion.
Mean
America
Illusion
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
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
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
September 11 Was A Day Of De-enlightenment. Politics Stood Revealed As A Veritable Walpurgis Night Of The Irrational. And Such Old, Old Stuff. The Conflicts We Now Face Or Fear Involve Opposed Geographical Arenas, But Also Opposed Centuries Or Even Millennia. It Is A Landscape Of Ferocious Anachronisms: Nuclear Jihad In The Indian Subcontinent; The Medieval Agonism Of Islam; The Bronze Age Blunderings Of The Middle East.
Night
September 11
Islam
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
Novelists Are Stamina Merchants, Grinders, Nine-to-fivers, And Their Career Curves Follow The Usual Arc Of Human Endeavour.
Curves
Careers
Novelists
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
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
Mere Fact Has No Chance Of Being Formally Perfect. It Will Get In The Way, It Will Be All Elbows.
Perfect
Elbows
Way
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
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.
Love
Black
World
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
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
People
Different
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.
Pride
Envy
Boredom
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
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.
Determination
Russia
Ideas
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
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.
Technique
Fiction
Crank
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 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
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
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
It Is Terrible To See Someone Being Beaten Up By The English Language.
Language
Terrible
English Language
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
Belief Is Otiose; Reality Is Sufficiently Awesome As It Stands.
Reality
Belief
While Making Love, We Often Talk About Money. I Like It. I Like That Dirty Talk
Dirty
Making Love
Dirty Talk
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.
Interviews
Sex Was Like Disneyland To Her: An Allotment Of Organized Wonders And Legal Mischief.
Sex
Wonder
Allotments
I Would Never Write About Someone That Forced Me To Write At A Lower Register Than What I Can Write.
Writing
Register
I Can
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
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.
Humor
Common Sense
Serious
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.
Thinking
Should Have
Boredom
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
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