For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantasti… - Martin Amis

She went at it as if the sexual act, in all human history, had never even been suspected of leading to childbirth, as if everyone had immemorially known that it was by other means that you peopled the world. All the ancient colourations of significance and consequence had been bleached from it... Whenever he thought of her naked body (and this would go on being true), he saw something like a desert, he saw a beautiful Sahara, with its slopes and dunes and whorls, its shadows and sandy vapours and tricks of the light, its oases, its mirages.

Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

What is the deep background on the deep male? From 100,000 BC until, let's say, 1792 — Mary Wollstonecraft and her Vindication of the Rights of Women — there was simply the man, whose main characteristics was that he got away with everything. From 1792 until about 1970, there was, in theory anyway, the "enlightened" man, who, while continuing to get away with everything, agreed to meet women to talk about talks which would lead to political concessions. Post-1970, the enlightened man became the new man, who isn't interested in getting away with anything, who believes, indeed, that the female is not merely equal to the male but is his plain superior.