All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'
Interpretation
The quote highlights the speaker's struggle to aptly characterize their father's unique comedic approach, eventually choosing a term that captures its controversial nature.
Martin Amis reflects on the challenge of finding the right words to describe his father's distinctive comedic style. While searching for an adjective, he concludes with 'defamatory,' suggesting that his father's humor was both aggressive and potentially harmful, indicating a complex relationship between love, art, and the nature of comedy.
In practice
In a speech about the complexity of familial relationships and humor.
Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.
Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark - spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.
You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?
Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.
Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.
It's important as a writer to do my art well and do it in a way that is powerful and beautiful and meaningful, so that my work regenerates the people, certainly Indian people, and the earth and the sun. And in that way we all continue forever.
An empty canvas is a living wonder - far lovelier than certain pictures.
Lets just say that I think any person who aspires, presumes, or feels the calling to be an artist has a built-in sense of duty.
We, as film-makers, are privileged. We can make people cry or laugh. We can make them think and feel. It is a great privilege and a great responsibility.
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
You can't have it all one way - be on the telly and the radio and make lots of money - and not offer anything to your followers when they need you.
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