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 โ 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. Weโre back where we started. To you, nothing โ from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much.
Martin AmisIt 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.
Martin AmisIt's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.
Martin AmisAll novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.
Martin Amis