Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will… - Martin Amis

Richard didn't mind Gwyn being rich...Having always been poor was good preparation for being rich. Better than having always been rich...The well and all its sweet water would surely one day run dry.

In the last months of the war, when I raped in uniform – we were, by then, so full of death (and the destruction of everything we had and knew) that the act of love, even in travesty, felt like a spell against the riot of murder.

I once wrote, in The Information, that an Englishman wouldn't bother to attend a reading even if the author in question was his favorite living writer, and also his long-lost brother — even if the reading was taking place next door. Whereas Americans go out and do things. But Meeting the Author, for me, is Meeting the Reader. Some of the little exchanges that take place over the signing table I find very fortifying: they make up for some of the other stuff you get.