Frasi di Martin Amis pagina 4

“Non è affatto chiaro come l'idea del paradiso-via-inferno [cioè il comunismo] abbia potuto sopravvivere a un solo istante di riflessione. Proviamo a immaginare che il "paradiso" promesso da Trockij sorgesse improvvisamente dal mucchio di macerie del 1921. Sapendo che per crearlo erano state sacrificate milioni di vite, chi avrebbe voluto abitarlo? Un paradiso a quel prezzo non è un paradiso. I mezzi determinano i fini, è stato detto, ma in Urss i mezzi sono stati l'unica cosa che si sia stati in grado di raggiungere. Esiste una contraddizione dentro la contraddizione: l'utopista militante, il perfettibilizzatore, nutre già in partenza una risentita rabbia verso l'evidenza della imperfettibilità umana. Nadezda Mandel'stam parla della "satanica" arroganza dei bolscevichi. La loro è anche un'infernale insicurezza e ostilità, un'infernale disperazione.”

Origine: Citato in Neil MacGregor, Civiltà degli scacchi http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2012/09/04/civilta-degli-scacchi.html, la Repubblica, 4 settembre 2012.

“La legge del 7 aprile 1935 era la cristallizzazione dello stalinismo "maturo". Cercate di immaginare la massa del guantone con cui Stalin vi colpiva in faccia, immaginate la massa.”

Origine: Da Koba il Terribile, Einaudi; citato in Stenio Solinas, Che vergogna l'Europa: i crimini staliniani pesano meno della Shoah http://www.ilgiornale.it/interni/che_vergogna_leuropa_crimini_staliniani_pesano_meno_shoah/24-12-2010/articolo-id=495687, il Giornale, 24 dicembre 2010.

“Le armi sono come i soldi; nessuno ne ha mai abbastanza.”

citato ibidem

“Le pallottole non possono essere chieste indietro. Non potevano non essere inventate. Ma possono essere tolte dai fucili.”

Origine: Da I mostri di Einstein.

“Qualcuno ci sorveglia mentre scriviamo. La madre. Il maestro. Shakespeare. Dio.”

da I mostri di Einstein

“Dove saremmo Tod e io senza il gabinetto? Dove saremmo senza tutta la spazzatura?”

Origine: Da London Fields, Vintage Books, 1991, p. 397.

Martin Amis Frasi e Citazioni

“Evidentemente è questa la caratteristica della città contemporanea. Puoi aver voglia di lavorarci. Ma nessuno si aspetta seriamente che tu ci viva.”

Time's Arrow

“Senza mai guardare dove sta andando, la gente si muove attraverso qualcosa di predisposto, armata di bugie. Non vede l'ora di raggiungere luoghi dai quali è appena tornata, o si rammarica di aver fatto cose che non ha ancora fatto. Signori delle bugie e della spazzatura - di ogni sorta di merda e di spazzatura.

[…]

Lo prendiamo ancora in culo ogni mattina come tutti gli altri - ma in questi giorni la cosa finisce in un baleno.”

Time's Arrow

“Era novembre. Gli umani si erano fatto crescere cappotti invernali e gli alti edifici tremavano nella stretta soffocante degli equilibri tra le diverse tensioni.”

Time's Arrow

“La città - è la città che dovrà guarirli, con lame di coltello e automobili, manganelli, colpi d'arma da fuoco. I cavi allentati e le pericolose costruzioni in muratura della città telecinetica.”

Time's Arrow

“Tod ama le folle. Nelle folle puoi essere un capo senza che nessuno se ne accorga.

[…]

Con estasi e con sollievo si annulla nell'unità più grande, nella massa incandescente”

Time's Arrow

“Perché piangono gli uomini? Per colpa delle lotte e delle gesta e della maratona delle promozioni, perché vogliono la mamma, perché restano ciechi anche col passar del tempo, per colpa di tutte le erezioni che debbono inventarsi sul più bello dal nulla, per colpa di tutto ciò che hanno fatto. Perché non possono più essere felici o tristi – solo sbronzi o pazzi. E perché non sanno che pesci pigliare quando sono svegli.
E poi c'è l'informazione, che arriva di notte.”

Time's Arrow

Martin Amis libro The Information

The Information

“Quando arriva il successo per uno scrittore inglese, questi si procura una nuova macchina da scrivere. Quando il successo arriva per uno scrittore americano, si procura una nuova moglie.”

“Natale è il periodo in cui tutte le ragazze parlano solo di cose belle, di cose calde.”

Origine: Da The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America.

“Tutti noi siamo tenuti insieme dalle parole, e quando le parole ci abbandonano non rimane più molto.”

Origine: Da Money; citato in Aa.Vv., Pensieri di Natale, a cura di Luigi La Rosa, BUR, Milano, 2005, p. 23. ISBN 88-17-00896-6

“One wonders how the literary revisionists and canon cleansers can bear to take the money. Imagine a school of sixteenth century art criticism that spent its time contently jeering at the past for not knowing about perspective.”

Origine: Da "L'inglese del re", in L'attrito del tempo, Einaudi, 2019, traduzione di Federica Aceto. Citato in Come polvere https://www.ilpost.it/2019/05/29/attrito-del-tempo-martin-amis/,

Martin Amis: Frasi in inglese

“Not greatly gifted, not deeply beautiful, Madonna tells America that fame comes from wanting it badly enough. And everyone is terribly good at badly wanting things.”

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

“The doltish euphemism of conglomerate America.”

"Madonna" (1992)
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993)

“The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.”

"Hugh Hefner" (1985)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending …”

"Claus von Bülow" (1983)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“As it turns out, Mailer comes close to solving the mystery [of Lee Harvey Oswald], but he never establishes the tragedy. Dreiser's tale was tragic and American because it happened every day. Oswald made only one notch in the calendar. It was meaningless; he just renamed an airport, violently.
…Oswald's life was not a cry of pain so much as a squawk for attention. He achieved geopolitical significance by the shortest possible route. He was not an example of post-modern absurdity but one of its messiahs: an inspiration to the glazed loner. He killed Kennedy not to impress Jodie Foster. He killed Kennedy to impress Clio - the muse of history.”

Martin Amis libro Experience

Introduction
Experience (2000)

“It would be inaccurate to say that John Fowles is a middlebrow writer who sometimes hopes he is a highbrow: it has never occurred to him to believe otherwise. There is a difference, morally.”

Review of Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery by Norman Mailer, p. 277
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“It isn't that the beau monde was too big for Capote's talents. The beau monde was too small for Capote's talents. Here, at least, in human terms the Very Rich are very poor. Interestingly, they are not interesting; incredibly, they are not even credible. They are certainly not the 'unspoiled monsters' of Capote's chapter title: they are spoiled mediocrities, they are boring freaks. The backgammon bums, the sweating champagne buckets, 'the Racquet Club, Le Jockey, the Links, White's', 'Lafayette, The Colony, La Grenouille, La Caravelle', 'Vuitton cases, Battistoni shirts, Lanvin suits, Peal shoes': how keen can a writer afford to be on all this?”

Opening lines of his review of Mantissa by John Fowles, p. 138
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.”

Review of "Answered Prayers" by Truman Capote, p. 311
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.”

Martin Amis libro Experience

Part I: Failures of Tolerance
Experience (2000)

“If people have personal conversations about very emotional matters in public, and people reveal parts of their body that were originally kept covered, and pornography is becoming semi-respectable, it makes you think the push for greater freedom and divesting yourself of inhibitions is a real human need. I'm 54, so I'm further back upon the road. We certainly did a fair amount of divesting ourselves of inhibitions, but there seems to have been a quantum leap in the last half a generation. Maybe we're destined to be freer, but it's taking odd forms, like showing your big gut to all the world and discussing the future of your marriage at a bus stop with 30 people listening in.”

"Gore Vidal" (1977)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“Sex has become much more competitive, with the girls becoming sort of predators as well. It's ferocious.”

Playboy interview (2003)

“Of obvious appeal to the humourless is the writer who comes on stage in a clown outfit or King Kong suit, with party hat and harem slippers, with banana skins and custard pies… It remains a sound rule that funny journalism can only flourish as the offshoot or sideline of something larger. No funny journalist who is that and nothing more will ever write anything lastingly funny.”

Playboy interview (2003)

“Our vulgar delight in American vulgarity.”

Review of The Best of Modern Humour edited by Mordecai Richler, p. 364
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“Tell a dream, lose a reader, said Henry James. Joyce told a dream, Finnegans Wake, and he told it in puns - cornily but rightly regarded as the lowest form of wit. This showed fantastic courage, and fantastic introversion. The truth is Joyce didn't love the reader, as you need to do. Well, he gave us Ulysses, incontestably the central modernist masterpiece; it is impossible to conceive of any future novel that might give the form such a violent evolutionary lurch. You can't help wondering, though. Joyce could have been the most popular boy in school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher's pet.”

"The New Evangelists" (1980)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“No one in the history of the written word, not even William MacGonagall, or Spike Milligan or D. H. Lawrence, is so wide open to damaging quotation. Try this, more or less at random: 'A murderer in the moment of his murder could feel a sense of beauty and perfection as complete as the transport of a saint.' Or this: Film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long. His italics.
On every page Mailer will come up with a formulation both grandiose and crass. This is expected of him. It is also expected of the reviewer to introduce a lingering 'yet' or 'however' at some point, and say that 'somehow' Mailer's 'fearless honesty' redeems his notorious excesses. He isn't frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn't frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn't frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses. Perhaps he ought to be a little less frightened of being frightened.”

Review of Ulysses, p. 446
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction. I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled.”

Review of The Essential Mailer by Norman Mailer, p. 267
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don’t want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.”

"Introduction"
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“Does screen violence provide a window or a mirror? Is it an effect or a cause, an encouragement, a facilitation? Fairly representatively, I think, I happen to like screen violence while steadily execrating its real-life counterpart. Moreover, I can tell the difference between the two. One is happening, one is not.”

Martin Amis libro Einstein's Monsters

"Introduction: Thinkability"
Einstein's Monsters (1987)

“PC is low, low church — it is the lowest common denomination.”

Review of Hollywood vs. America by Michael Medved, p. 16
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.”

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

“While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw - that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedy; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75 per cent of the whole), inhumanly dull…. Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 - the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right: not tears of relief but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.”

Martin Amis libro Einstein's Monsters

"Introduction: Thinkability"
Einstein's Monsters (1987)

“Bly is a poet, he is a big cat, so to speak, and not some chipmunk from the how-to culture. But it is the how-to culture that has picked up on his book. … And yet, for a while Iron John transformed male consciousness in the United States. The wild men weekends and initiation, adventure holidays and whatnot, which were big business, may prove to be ephemeral. But what does one make of the unabashed references in the press to "men's liberation" and the men's movement and the fact that there are now at least half a dozen magazines devoted to nothing else? Changing men, journeymen, man. … Bly's average reader is not a poet and a critic, but a weightlifter from Brooklyn.”

Opening paragraph of his review of The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Tobias Smollett
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.”

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

“Iron John, a short work of psychological, literary and anthropological speculation by the poet Robert Bly, dominated the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year and made, as we shall see, a significant impact on many aspects of American life. In England, it made no impression whatever. … We are British over in Britain, we are skeptical, ironical, et cetera, and are not given, as Americans are, to seeking expert advice on basic matters. Especially such matters as our manhood. In England, maleness itself has become an embarrassment: male consciousness, male pride, male rage, we don't want to hear about.”

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)