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.
Martin AmisAmerica has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.
Martin AmisI 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.
Martin AmisYou know, I wouldnโt have done this a month ago. I wouldnโt have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now Iโm just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They have to go ahead and happen. You watch โ you waitโฆ 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 โ any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.
Martin AmisI 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.)
Martin Amis