Quote of the Day (Martin Amis, on the Reader and the Author)

“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.”— English novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter Martin Amis (1949-2023), “Don’t Call Him Mellow Bellow,” originally published in The Guardian (UK), Aug. 17, 1997, republished in The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (2001)

(The image accompanying this post, of Martin Amis in a hotel suite in Cologne, Germany, was taken Mar. 17, 2012 by Maximilian Schonherr.)

Quote of the Day (Martin Amis, on How Utopia Becomes Dystopia)

“Every imagined Utopia, from Plato to the present day, helplessly becomes a Dystopia, almost certainly because the writers just couldn’t resist the urge to make the ‘place’ sound halfway interesting. Otherwise the Perfect Society is perfectly inhuman and perfectly inane. What would you do all day in Utopia? And who now would turn to a map of the world in a vain quest for the wastelands called Never Has Been, Never Could Be and Never Should Be?”—English novelist-essayist Martin Amis, “The Deadliest Idealism,” in The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 22, 2017,  collected in The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage,1994-2017 (2018)

(Photo of Martin Amis taken at the 2014 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, by Larry D. Moore.)