Extended excerpt: [Memoir]

“This happenstance has shown me, through long retrospect, that even fiction is uncontrollable. You may think you control it. You may feel you control it. You don’t. But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.” (p. 36)

Source link: Library – Experience (2000) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-7868-6652-7

Extended excerpt: [Book review]

“This is a big job, because being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.”

Source link: [Accessed August 2015] “First Lady on Trial” (17 Mar. 1996) Reprint via Martin Amis Web: http://www.martinamisweb.com/commentary_files/ma_takesavillage.pdf

Extended excerpt: [Interview – Amis, discussing the narrator’s general point-of-view in his novel The Information]:

“What is difficult is to write well about happiness. Not many people have done that. Perhaps Tolstoy, perhaps early D.H. Lawrence. That is clearly a greater challenge than writing dark. Writing light is very difficult. 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. If you are a comic writer, which I mainly am, you want things going wrong. That is what comedy is about.”

Source link: [Accessed November 2015] “The Sadistic Muse” (10 Feb. 1998) Salon: http://www.salon.com/1998/02/10/cov_si_10int/

Extended excerpt: [Lecture]

“We can imagine the first stanza being greeted with a kind of applause that sounds like the thunder of the herd, but for the second we imagine a more individual sound, laugher with its forgiveness, because laughter always forgives.”

Source link: [Accessed March 2015] “Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin” (29 Jan. 1997) Harvard IOP video: http://iop.harvard.edu/forum/political-correctness-robert-bly-and-philip-larkin

Extended excerpt: [Interview]

[Question]: Do you recognize in yourself a puritanical streak? After all, you do believe in

innocence – simple innocence and criminal innocence – and in corruption.

[Martin Amis]: “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 that 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.” (pp. 13-14)

Source: Library – Novelists in Interview (1985) International Standard Book Number (ISBN): 9780416376005

Extended excerpt: [Refering to an excerpt of Lord Rochester’s Satyr Against Mankind]:

“The age of reason, individuality and empiricism was on its way, and Rochester was suspicious of the new reality. His worries were needless. On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational – to thinking, seeing, learning, knowledge. Believing is what he’s really proud of.”

Source link: “The voice of the lonely crowd” (31 May 2002) The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jun/01/philosophy.society

Extended excerpt: [Book introduction]

“The A-bomb is a Z-bomb, and the arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves. It is them or us.” (p. 27)

Source: Library – Einstein’s Monsters (1987) International Standard Book Number (ISBN): 0-224-02435-3

Extended excerpt: [Book introduction – Italics original to quoted text.]

“A new emphasis on defence combined with the status quo is just more of the same. It is just more weapons. Weapons are like money: no one knows the meaning of enough.” (p. 24)

Source: Library – Einstein’s Monsters (1987) International Standard Book Number (ISBN): 0-224-02435-3