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.
Martin AmisMy 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.
Martin AmisIn 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 Rรฉsistance. In fact, they collaborated, not resisted.
Martin AmisPresent-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.
Martin Amis