God, I loved Martin Amis. There’s a video on YouTube that I must have watched a dozen times, where he’s lounging in a library with Clive James, puffing cigarettes and talking books.
At one point Amis says something I’ve been thinking about ever since the news came through that he’d sadly died from cancer at the age of 73: “Writers never find out how good they are, because the argument starts with the obituaries.”
