In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.
From Martin Amis
If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.
Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.
Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
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.
The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.
All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.
When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.
Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
2 perspectives
1 perspectives