Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.
Martin AmisAll writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.
Martin AmisHe awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
Martin AmisAmerica is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions.
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 Amis