What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism.
While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw – that of outright unreadability.
When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.
The literary interview won’t tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.
Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.
Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I’m in a funk about it, I’ve got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.
More will mean worse.
No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.
Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist – in other words, my mother did it all.
It’s an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That’s an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise – except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.
They’re always looking forward to going places they’re just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven’t yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.
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.
You use a different part of your heart with girls.
It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.
On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational – to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he’s really proud of.
In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it “vow-of-poverty prose.” No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.
You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks.
The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.
Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.
All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.