Ian

“We bring Kingsley comfort, by being here, but only one visitor has brought him any pleasure: Jaime. He enjoyed, he exulted in Jaime – because the dew is yet on him, the glamour is yet on him. Jaime brought his youth, in all its Conradian force (youth, that ‘mighty power’). I haven’t got any youth to offer my father. This year has closed my youth. I’m sorry, Dad: I haven’t got any . . . Sometimes I imagine that the dead are allowed to watch their children. This would be one of their privileges. But there must come a point where the dead really wouldn’t want to look. William Amis, even Rosa Amis: they wouldn’t be watching now.”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“I will now take the chance to repeat my contention that the drama is handily inferior to the novel and the poem. Dramatists who have lasted more than a century include Shakespeare and – who else? One is soon reaching for a sepulchral Norwegian. Compare that to English poetry and its great waves of immortality. I agree that it is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright. I scream with laughter about it all the time. This is one of God’s best jokes.”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good