Martin Amis

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INTERVIEWER

Can you talk about the influence of other writers or poets? I know one of them is Saul Bellow.

AMIS

I would say they are more inspirers than influences. When I am stuck with a sentence that isn’t fully born, it isn’t yet there, I sometimes think, How would Dickens go at this sentence, how would Bellow or Nabokov go at this sentence? What you hope to emerge with is how you would go at that sentence, but you get a little shove in the back by thinking about writers you admire.

-- Martin Amis at The Paris Review

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Funny Winter

It rained quite a bit last night, enough rain that I cannot give the cats a break and let them run outside. This is a funny winter. Usually, in past years, the problem has been, as far as the nights are concerned, that it is either too cold or too wet to let the cats out. If it was not freezing outside, it would likely rain, with the cats climbing the walls and curtains and screaming at the closed doors. I came to think that the science was such that we couldn't get both, rain and wintry chill, unless it possibly came in the form of snow. But this winter is expanding my education. The temperatures will drop into the thirties, and we still get rain. It is also one the colder winters all the way around. I kind of like it, but the cats spoil it for me. Remember, I am a February drizzle kind of guy: I like it a little cold and overcast, and I think a light rain is pretty. I am just not really a cat person, even though I am hopelessly in love with these three rascals, even as they murder sleep and claw away at my frayed nerves.

Lolita

“It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced with the task of inventing America.”

-- Vladimir Nabokov

During one glorious summer, while traveling about America by car, collecting butterfly specimens, Nabokov made a conscious study of our fair countrysides and of teenage girls ((wholly on the up and up)).

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As they traveled from one promising site to another, Vera would take charge of the driving as Vladimir jotted down notes and observations on the people and places they encountered. Familiarity with the motels, restaurants, gas stations, and other roadside attractions of America’s highways and byways proved indispensable to the author of Lolita, as did the series of local bus rides he took to record teenage jargon and “schoolgirl slang”.

-- Ellen Pifer, “Introduction” in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook ed. by Ellen Pifer

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