That certain snobbery of certainly the Parisian - combined with a complete denial of your historical legacy, is just awful. That's a funny thing about France. Saul Bellow wrote somewhere that he saw right through the French. He lived there. He wrote The Adventures of Augie March in Paris, and there's no one better than him to say what's unbearable about the French.
Martin AmisWhen 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.
Martin AmisLike fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
Martin AmisMy belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.
Martin AmisWhen things are going well, you do have the sense that what youโre 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. Itโs sacred and itโs secret, even to the writer.
Martin Amis