I love Paris

I’ve discovered the Paris Review Interviews. I’m hooked; finally my obsession with cricket statistics has been sidelined. Everyone, every major living author of the past fifty years - Auster, Waugh, Vonnegut, Updike, McEwan, Derek Walcott, Iris Murdoch, Harold Pinter, William Golding, everyone – talks in depth about writing, their influences and themselves. Here’s a snippet from an interview with Martin Amis:

'AMIS
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.

INTERVIEWER
Which type is in your queue?

AMIS
Well, I did one with Roald Dahl and quite predictable human divisions were observable. For him, a lot of children, a lot of parents of children. 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.'

That will confirm what you either love or hate about wild-eyed sleazebag Martin Amis. Each interview is as revealing.