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.

Martin Amis

Categorized in : Giving Hair Sunset

Every day, the dispensing of existence.... Its face is fierce and... by Martin Amis

Every day, the dispensing of existence.... Its face is fierce and distant and ancient.

ancient fierce faces

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

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.

intelligent stupid thinking

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.

reading people interesting

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh mov... by Martin Amis

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

games chess moving

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.

men believe thinking

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 nuclear defense

Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.

sloth goal lust

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. by Martin Amis

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

changed novel 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.

egotism feelings people

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

novelists twenties age

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.

impact children thinking

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.

novelists body real

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

novelists writing two

Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit. by Martin Amis

Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.

pain limits

I think writers are excited by stupidity and bad behavior, genera... by Martin Amis

I think writers are excited by stupidity and bad behavior, generally.

excited stupidity thinking

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.

ugly admire heart

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.

lucky careers firsts

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.

angel animal book

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

hero class america