Martin Amis

"What makes you a writer? You develop an extra sense that partly excludes you from experience. When writers experience things, they’re not really experiencing them anything like a hundred percent. They’re always holding back and wondering what the significance of it is, or wondering how they’d do it on the page. Always this disinterestedness . . . as if it really isn’t to do with you, a certain cold impartiality."

-- Martin Amis

Dick Cavett

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INTERVIEWER

Which of your talk show guests did you most enjoy discussing books with? And what were the best conversations about literature you had on your show?

CAVETT

Cheever, Updike, Capote, Mailer, Burgess, Auden and others were great, with Vidal the best. A trap with authors: finding yourself on the air with a favorite producer of lyric, mellifluous prose who can’t talk for . . . whatever.

Burgess recounted how, diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor, he rapidly dashed off four novels in succession to support his family. Upon learning he’d been misdiagnosed, he claimed he was “vaguely disappointed. All that hard work for nothing.” Cheever on drinking while writing? “I can detect a sip of sherry in a paragraph.” Gore on Truman Capote’s death: “A brilliant career move.”

-- Dick Cavett at The New York Times

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