Essayists From England

"What is this televisual mastery of Reagan's? It is a celebration of good intentions and unexceptional abilities. His style is one of hammy self-effacement, a wry dismay at his own limited talents and their drastic elevation."

"When you review an exhibition of paintings you don't compose a painting about it, when you review a film you don't make a film about it and when you review a new CD you don't make a little CD about it. But when you review a prose-narrative then you write a prose-narrative about that prose-narrative and those who write the secondary prose-narrative, let's face it, must have once had dreams of writing the primary prose-narrative. And so there is a kind of hierarchy of envy and all those other things."

"What happened on September 11? On September 11 — what happened? Picture this: two upended matchboxes, knocked over by the sheer force of paper-darts. Only it was much, much worse than that. In fact, words alone cannot adduce how much worse it was than that. September 11 was an attack on words: we felt a general deficit. And with words destroyed, we had to make do, we had to bolster truth with colons and repetition: not only repetition: but repetition and: colons. This is what we adduce."

"Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares — loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains."

"America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was."

"[I am] secular to the bones, but not an atheist."

"What is the deep background on the deep male? From 100,000 BC until, let's say, 1792 — Mary Wollstonecraft and her Vindication of the Rights of Women — there was simply the man, whose main characteristics was that he got away with everything. From 1792 until about 1970, there was, in theory anyway, the "enlightened" man, who, while continuing to get away with everything, agreed to meet women to talk about talks which would lead to political concessions. Post-1970, the enlightened man became the new man, who isn't interested in getting away with anything, who believes, indeed, that the female is not merely equal to the male but is his plain superior."

"I have strong moral views, and they are very much directed at things like money and acquisition. I think money is the central deformity in life, as Saul Bellow says, it's one of the evils that has cheerfully survived identification as an evil. Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy we have all agreed to go along with. My hatred for it does look as though I'm underwriting a certain asceticism, but it isn't really that way: I don't offer alternatives to what I deplore."

"Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions."

"Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal."

"Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture."

"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 Amis's reputation as the bad boy of British writing shouldn't overpower the fact that he's simply a fantastic writer. His brash, intelligent novels are sharp with insight, and his wordplay makes reading Amis feel like playing: swinging high in a swing, hanging from monkey bars, just having fun. Yet his view of the world is not a light one... authors across the "pond" often hone a super-realism that is actually bleak. Amis's hyperbole makes his works funny, but they're funny with an edge."

"Martin, rather than step into the spotlight, would prefer to die in an unarmed attack on the power station supplying its electric current. His genuine modesty is the main reason for the fateful discrepancy between him and the journalistic literary sexton beetles who make copy out of him: they would like to receive the degree of attention that he would like to avoid, and the clearer it becomes that he would like to avoid it, the more they resent him for failing to appreciate their generosity."

"She thought of an article she had once seen on mind control. Apparently if there was a person fiendish enough to set about interfering with your life, the only thing you could do was to concentrate hard on someone they were unlikely ever to have heard of called Martin Amis. The particular blankness of this image was guaranteed to protect from any subtle force, but Gloria realised with a sinking heart that it was too late now."

"She went at it as if the sexual act, in all human history, had never even been suspected of leading to childbirth, as if everyone had immemorially known that it was by other means that you peopled the world. All the ancient colourations of significance and consequence had been bleached from it... Whenever he thought of her naked body (and this would go on being true), he saw something like a desert, he saw a beautiful Sahara, with its slopes and dunes and whorls, its shadows and sandy vapours and tricks of the light, its oases, its mirages."

"Pornographic sex is a kind of sex that can be described. Which told you something, he felt, about pornography, and about sex. During Keith's time, sex divorced itself from feeling. Pornography was the industrialization of that rift."

"Envy is negative empathy."

"It kept astonishing him — how weak the prohibitions always turned to be, and how ready everyone was to claim the new ground, every inch of it. An automatic annexation. What was called, in children, self-extension, as they stockpiled each dawning power and freedom, without gratitude, without thought. And now: where were the hinderers, the wet blankets, where were the miseries, where were the police?"

"You know, it's not the rich who're really different from us. It's the beautiful."

"You will get these people who are felt to be educational, even though, as Clive James said, a sense of humour is common sense dancing. Those who haven’t got it, a sense of humour, shouldn’t be trusted with anything. You’re amazed they can get across the road. But proclaimed humourlessness has a constituency, I don’t know why."

"I’m an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It’s not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up. But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it’s incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe. We are a dozen Einsteins away. It’s pathetic."

"Writers are above all individuals, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions. I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it’s a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there is no other thing. Don’t use the word God: but something more intelligent than us… If we can’t understand it, then it’s formidable. And we understand very little. We don’t understand the weak nuclear force, galaxy formation … so one should be humble."

"In the seventeenth century, it is said, there was a dissociation of sensibility. The poets could no longer think and feel at the same time.[…] All we are saying is that something analogous happened while the children of the Golden Age were becoming men and women. Feeling was already separated from thought. And then feeling was separated from sex."

"Dryden said, literature is instruction and delight, and there are people who think that if they’re not getting delight then they are getting a lot of instruction, when in fact they’re not getting that either. But it has a sort of of gloomy constituency. If there is no pleasure transmitted then I’m not interested. I mean, look at them all: Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Smollet, Fielding, they’re all funny. All the good ones are funny."

"It was already obvious that every hard and demanding adaptation would be falling to the girls. Not to the boys — who were all like that anyway. The boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose."

"Sex has become much more competitive, with the girls becoming sort of predators as well. It's ferocious."

"The fund of sensible discourse is limited; that of jest and badinerie is infinite."

"Prudent men should lock up their motives, giving only their intimates a key."

"Health is beauty, and the most perfect health is the most perfect beauty."

"Second thoughts are oftentimes the very worst of all thoughts."

"Some men are called sagacious, merely on account of their avarice: whereas a child can clench its fist the moment it is born."

"There seem near as many people that want passion as want reason."

"Independency may be found in comparative, as well as absolute abundance: I mean when a person contracts his desires within the limits of his fortune."

"Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention."

"Zealous men are ever displaying to you the strength of their belief, while judicious men are shewing you the grounds of it."

"While we labour to subdue our passions, we should take care not to extinguish them. Subduing our passions, is disengaging ourselves from the world; to which however, Whilst we reside in it, we must always bear relation; and we may detach ourselves to such a degree as to pass an useless and insipid life, which we were not meant to do. Our existence here is at least one part of a system.A man has generally the good or ill qualities which he attributes to mankind."

"Every good poet includes a critic; the reverse will not hold."

"It is a miserable thing to love where one hates; and yet it is not inconsistent."

"Love can be founded upon nature only; or the appearance of it."

"A fool and his words are soon parted; a man of genius and his money."

"Sloth views the tow'rs of fame with envious eyes; Desirous still, still impotent to rise."

"Let us be careful to distinguish modesty, which is ever amiable, from reserve, which is only prudent."

"A large, branching, aged oak, is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects."

"Theirs is the present who can praise the past."

"Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome, at an inn."

"She pleas'd while distant, but, when near, she charm'd."

"A man of remarkable genius may afford to pass by a piece of wit, if it happens to border on abuse. A little genius is obliged to catch at every witticism indiscriminately."

"Let the gull'd fool the toil of war pursue, Where bleed the many to enrich the few."

"For seldom shall she hear a tale So sad, so tender, yet so true."