On writing

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.

I find that people take my writing rather personally. It’s interesting when you’re doing signing sessions with other writers and you look at the queues at each table and you can see definite human types gathering there … With Julian Barnes, his queue seemed to be peopled by rather comfortable, professional types. My queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags and people who stare at me very intensely, as if I have some particular message for them. As if I must know that they’ve been reading me, that this dyad or symbiosis of reader and writer has been so intense that I must somehow know about it.

To me it seems like a part-time job, really, in that writing from 11 to 1 continuously is a very good day’s work. Then you can read and play tennis or snooker. Two hours. I think most writers would be very happy with two hours of concentrated work.

Any smoker will sympathise when I say that after your first cup of coffee you have a sobbing, pleading feeling in the lungs as they cry out for their first cigarette of the day, and my desire to write is rather like that. It’s rather physical.

There are pains you have to go through when writing a novel. If I wrote a novel without that – where it was all flowing, from beginning to end – it would make me very suspicious. It has to have the admixture of pain. But otherwise it seems to me a hilariously enjoyable way of spending one’s time. Assigning life to all these propositions, and (usually) dreaming up people, rather than taking them from life.

I have no patience for anything experimental or obscure – above all, obscure. I have to know at all times exactly what’s going on. I’m very committed to the pleasure principle. You read literature to have a good time. Or why else would people go on doing it?

On his father, Kingsley Amis

He was brilliantly indolent: he never gave me any encouragement at all. I later realised how valuable and necessary that was.

I left the proofs [of The Rachel Papers] on his desk and went off on holiday. When I came back, he’d gone on holiday. But he left a brief, charming note saying he thought it was enjoyable and fun and all that. I think that was the last novel of mine he read all the way through.

I always thought if he had been born a generation later, he would have written my novels. And if I’d been born a generation earlier, I would have written his novels.

On cancel culture

Every fibre in my being resists. It’s a philistine manifesto. It’s anti-creativity. Appropriation means taking without permission – who do you ask permission of? It’s getting that way in every direction. I got bollocked for writing about the working classes in Lionel Asbo. But I’d been doing that since I started.

On his comments about Islamism

Well, there was an unpleasant flurry [at that time], and I certainly regretted having said what I said; already by mid-afternoon on that day I ceased to believe in what I said. Collective punishment is obviously ruled out by definition – it was the sort of thing you say towards the end of a long interview without really having time to clear it with yourself. But that never felt like a great convulsion in my life. One death threat and a lot of chat. It wasn’t much of a cancellation.

On feminism

I’ve been a passionate feminist since the mid-80s. It was Gloria Steinem who converted me in a single day in New York. It’s the rhetorical device she uses throughout, and it’s very effective: she just reverses the sexes – what if men menstruated, what if men had babies? It’s unanswerable.

On politics

I’m secure in my conviction that socialism doesn’t work, because it goes against human nature. The idea of people acting out of social altruism is not part of human nature. It’s an element in it, but it’s not a guiding principle. I’ve always been a gradualist.

One of the real truths of the 21st century, and earlier, is that history is speeding up. We’re all on a sort of rollercoaster now. There are existential threats that weren’t fully acknowledged not so long ago. We are sort of hurtling forward. It’s more of a task to ask people to slow down.

Remembering Christopher Hitchens

He had a greater love of life than me. He really enjoyed everything, so much. I quite like life, but I’m not as crazy about it as he was. It somehow formulated itself in me that, now he was dead, it was my job to love life as much as he did.

Christopher was a real contrarian. One of things I’m proud of is that friendship. We never had even the slightest froideur about disagreements. I think it’s a good rule never to lose a friend over an argument. Never get into these sincerity contests: “I feel so strongly about this that I never want to see you again.” Rubbish. I disagreed with Hitchens violently over literary things as well as political things. But it never got to the point of raised voices. That’s partly because real friendship is rare, particularly male friendship.

On ageing

My father said to me that when a writer of 25 puts pen to paper he’s saying to the writer of 50 that it’s no longer like that, it’s like this. The older writer, at some point, is going to lose touch with what the contemporary moment feels like, although some writers do amazing jobs, Saul Bellow being a good example.

I feel I’m only going to write short stories and novellas from now on. Chekhov said, toward the end of his life, “Everything I read strikes me as not short enough.” And I agree.

In the old days it came quicker, the prose. Now it’s a battle. It’s not about coming up with striking adverbs, it’s more about removing as many uglinesses as I can find.

I don’t want this to get out of control or I’ll be drowning in schmaltz, but it all starts to look very beautiful now that I know I’m not going to be around indefinitely. You know, the way that to a prisoner condemned to death, water tastes delicious, the air tastes sweet, a bread-and-butter sandwich makes tears spring to the eye.