Experience Quotes

“What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired. More than that, they both lived their lives 'beautifully'--not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been a prerequisite), but in the droll fortitude of their perseverance. They got the work done, with style.”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“…Here we come close to one of the definitions of literary fiction. Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel. Whereas you do have a conversation (you have an intense argument) with [literary fiction].”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending.”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“The ad world used to be something of a refuge for literary types. But I feared for myself at J.W.T. It seemed to be entirely peopled by blocked dramatists, likeably shambling poets, and one-off novelists. The whole place felt like a clubworld sunset home for literary talent. ”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“I want to convey a mood, and what you are reading is a constituent of how you feel. In biographies they should always tell us that, routinely, in the margin: what they were reading. What”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“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

“…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.”
― 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

“This is where we really go when we die: into the hearts of those who remember us. And all our hearts were bursting with her.”
― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning; and the same ending”
― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

“Kingsley used to tell the following anecdote about sibling rivalry – how he found me, when I was four or five, lying on the stairs in an ecstasy of grief, how he worriedly knelt at my side and, after several minutes, managed to quell my hiccuppy gaspings, my heaving chest. Then he said, ‘Easy now . . . What is it?’ When at last I could find and shape the words, I said, ‘Philip had a biscuit’ . . .”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“The father is dying, as did his (and as did his).”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“a fantastic collision (collide: ‘from col- “together” + laedere “to strike” ’). It is what happens when darkness meets light, when experience meets innocence, when the false meets the true, when utter godlessness meets purity of spirit,”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“The hope that things might have turned out differently could now be seen as the pitifully fragile thing it was, while the braced body began its labour to live with the other outcome.”
― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

“Cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead: there ought to be a word for that. ‘Grieving’ won’t quite serve. This is something anterior. It is, I think, not a struggle to accept but a struggle to believe.”
― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

“Can you think about something you can’t assimilate? I don’t think you can. Or I don’t think you do.”
― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

“It’s a strange surprise, becoming a writer, but nothing is more ordinary to you than what your dad does all day. The pains, and perhaps some of the pleasures, of authorship were therefore dulled to me. It was business as usual. I was working very hard, I was full of endeavour, but it seemed to be the least I could do.”
― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

“The nineteen-year-old hero of my first novel was described in one review as ‘both a gilded and a repulsive creature’. I accept this description, for my hero and for myself.”
― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

“Fame is a worthless commodity. It will occasionally earn you some special treatment, if that is what you’re interested in getting. It will also earn you a far more noticeable amount of hostile curiosity.”
― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

“the locus of so many parental dealings, after a while, when the Chauffeuring Years begin to stretch out ahead of you like an autobahn.”
― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir