YouSaid · the spoken record

Martin Amis

lines on the record: 23
first: 2023-05-24
most recent: 2023-05-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Only a pessimist or a cynic can, I think, convince himself that he'll be re elected. There is a sort of pendulum of decency in the American psyche that doesn't like daily scandals, daily crimes, hourly lies. Some of us said that it's as if he's been there for eight years. It's as if he's already done two terms, because we're all so knackered by having to attend to him. So I think every pressure of human decency is working the other way now. If I was completely wrong about him getting elected in the first place, if he's re-elected, then I would know I won't emigrate. He's a reason to stay, not a reason to leave. And it'll be like the fall of Saigon or the collapse of communism to watch a great nation dissolve will be interesting. In the Chinese sense may live in interesting times. The curse is”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was very marked on the day after he was elected, and I went out the next morning and was reminded of something that Sebastian Hafner had said about Hitler after he was elected in nineteen thirty three. He said it wasn't horror that he felt it was a sense of total unreality, which is quite alarming in itself, where everything looks tinny and air sats, and that's how it's been, I mean, every time I hear the phrase President Trump, I almost knocked out by what an oxymoron it is. There must be some mistake, I think, every time I hear it. It was a disgracefully frivolous vote for a disgracefully frivolous candidate, and a shame that America will have to carry as long as it lasts.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And philosophy has been defined by philosophers as learning how to die. Well, they haven't told us how to do it, have they? They kept it to themselves. I've never seen any helpful advice about how to go about it. It is neuz ultra no further beyond. Sorbello said It's not that our knowledge of death is superficial or misguided. He said there is no knowledge. By definition there can be no knowledge. So it does power the novel in a sense, since it makes everything in life contingent and subject to cancel culture of the most physical kind.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, thank you, Alex. I'm very glad that that's what you took from it. I'd say towards the end also that the novel depends on death, that if we did have this moronic state where we all live forever, there would be no fiction, there'd be no art. There wouldn't be enough fascination in the deeper sense of that word which used to describe the power of a predator to paralyze the prey merely by the power of the gaze. And we all gaze at death. It's a very gradual process, begins with the death of a hamster and then advances through the death of a grandparent until not until our thirties or forties do we actually realize that it's going to happen to us too. Freud called death the complex symbol since no one could seriously visualize this. Their own extinction.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Angela Merkel so much because she'd been a tremendously successful and unifying politician who nonetheless is still identifiably female, feminine. I was in Germany twenty fifteen when a million immigrants converged on it. She was known adoringly as Muti Merkel, not as a leader as a mother, and I thought this is what”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“as you feel so strongly about it that you have to hurt someone to make your point. And that's why I'm a gynecrat, I'm for female rule, in that I think that there's a real chance of getting off this train that we've been on since civilization began. And very often female leaders, and there have been about fifty now, fifty women head of states, like Hillary Clinton, who in fact failed in the end to achieve that, but she used to talk as tough as a man, you know, a blue Iran of the map if they do this. And I thought no, that's got to be eradicated too. No longer should women pretend to be as violent as men or have those destructive impulses, and that's why I admire”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, terrible. But it's the biblical, it's the Christian message you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, that if you enter into someone's feelings, empathy is what the novel taught us. And I was thrilled to find that conceivably my lifetime work has been to bring the level of violence down by a tenth or a millimeter. That seems to me tremendously well worth doing. I think violence is the great curse of mankind with the emphasis on man, since it is almost exclusively a male interest and pursuit I talk at one point about Trump submitting to the moronic sincerity of violence at his rallies and so on. It's the primitive manifestation of sincerity.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was so thrilled to learn from Stephen Pinker that one of the causes he lists seven or eight invention of printing, the introduction of police forces, the formation of nation states, etc, but also there, last but not least, is the rise of the novel, that the very action of reading put the 18th century literate English speaker in close contact with Clarissa Harlow, Samuel Richardson's credibly long and in my view tedious novel about”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I got off pretty slight in that case because they could have been doing it for nearly half a century. But I can't take it seriously for a minute because it is anti-freedom within the pages of a book. And the novelists sway in a novel is infinite. You are in a godlike relationship to the world you create. And I can't accept I keep saying fiction is freedom, adding that freedom is indivisible, that either you've got it or you haven't. I would insist that only over my dead body would I compromise that freedom to oblige these concerns that are strictly socio political, they're never literary.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, cancel culture, it seems to me, is just antithetical to the spirit of literature, that the critic or the commentator shouldn't be there writing speeding tickets and erecting no entry signs, any hint of coercion or censure it seems to be just anti literary. It's a Philistine manifesto, this idea, for instance, that only black people can write about black people I was scolded a couple of novels ago for writing about the working classes in England, which I've been doing for forty years without comment.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This, you just couldn't understand it. He said the idea of my character is getting out of control. He said, my character's cringe when I come near. And he said, I've seen whole avenues of imagined trees lose their leaves in horror as I approach. In other words presents himself as this authorial tyrant. He's just making a point comically. But I think most writers would agree that there is a kind of interaction with the characters as well as with the reader that they go off in unexpected directions and they insist on their own quidity, their own thisness that they aren't just pawns in your scheme, that it's a much more livelier and slightly more anarchical process.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I don't see any point in concealing the fact that she is made up. She never happened. I did have some notion earlier on that the female character, the love interest would be a sort of amalgam of early girlfriends, but then I thought, nah, let me enjoy this holiday from my own life and just create a character. And then it was marvelously informative to find out the difference between simply transferring a real person onto the page and the difference between that and actually creating them. And it's not that they take on a life of their own. Ian Foster used to line up his characters and say to them write no larks, you've got to behave yourself.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in autobiographical kind of book. Your concerns might be universal, but your daily life can never be. But I thought tending to be universalized by the fact that many of the characters are just they represent a certain type of literature, a certain tone of literature. And I was crudely exploiting that privileged observer position.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the most vulgar level, it's full of people who are famous that I was an incredibly fortunately placed observer of the literary life in that my father was a writer, my stepmother of sixteen years was a writer, there were as writers throwing up in the driveway and falling down the stairs and academics, critics, they were in and out of the house all my life, including Larkin and others. So I was depending on that to distinguish my life from most others. The dogged what happened to me yesterday type of novel is, I think, very hard to justify and very hard to make interesting, and very hard to make universal. In fact, you can't make the individual universal inner.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Madame Bovary. The reader is an artist and no two conceptions of the same character will hold, and it's a collaborative form in that interactive form.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And serve you his best wines and so on, but more than that he would want to stimulate you into vividness so that he could be stimulated by you. I've been trying to read Faulkner recently. And with him, you know, you ring his doorbell and he says, Who the hell are you? And who asked you along? And James Choyce would be the same. You'd be given an address of a house that doesn't exist, and then you'd have to fight your way through a building site, and then he would not appear for half an hour, and then he would arrive, arguing with himself in several languages at once. I can't be doing with that any more. I think there is a quite firm contract between writer and reader, and there are dozens of little correspondences that no two readers have the same image.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the reader and the writer that is an incredibly complicated relationship, although it seems straightforward enough, the more you think about it. I mean, in a sense they're the same thing, just as the word guest and host are the same as the same root, and in French, I believe, Julian Barnes tells me that they're interchangeable, just depending on context. So it appealed to me a great deal, and I think I've discovered the kind of writing I like more and more is this welcoming, this hospitality from the writer, and I turning more and more decisively against experimentation freakishness and above all obscurity. If you went round to Trollop's house, he would welcome”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You little shift of perspective, you can go into the third person. When you're writing about embarrassing Shameful interludes in your life.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wondering what he would think about it. You didn't have to worry about the reaction of the principles. And then, of course, it slowed down. It came at the usual rate of fiction which is about.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“be blunt about it. Christopher Ach My triad of writers in this book Philip Larkin, Sorbello and Hitchens, were suddenly all dead. And that I wondered after a year or two after Christopher died, I thought perhaps I can tell you.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is. It's actually Of the reasons I wrote the book was to find out what some of the differences are between autobiography and memoir and fiction. May sound rather abstract to many, but Thought I can't write another memoir. already done that I know my way around that and it's a it's a An excellent form. I agreed with Samrushi when he wrote that Joseph Anton. It's easy It comes at good about twice the rate. Because you don't have to make anything up. So I thought, well, I can't do that again.”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here to discuss the extraordinary insight. Martin. You are in New York currently? In fact, I'm making eyes at the Statue of Liberty, which is in plain view. Excellent. So, Martin, inside story”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Early on in his 15th novel Martin Amos writes of reading For A writer who is This is what I felt. Aged fifteen I first picked”
2023-05-24 · Intelligence Squared · Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Death · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT