In a long, searching interview – in which among other items, he discusses pornography, poetry, Christopher Hitchens, and the sexual revolution – Martin Amis points to our fascination with failure and decline:
Well, I’m afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success. And we’re sort of biologically locked in to decline. I interviewed Graham Greene for his 80th birthday, and I said—incredibly impertinently, it now seems—well, at least you’ve got religion. You’ll be needing that, soon.
And he said, oh, no. My faith is much weaker than it used to be. Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing. And the writer in decline is a contribution of medical science—it didn’t used to come up, because they’re all dead. Dickens at 58, Shakespeare at 52, Jane Austen at 41. Didn’t used to come up. But now you have 80-year-old novelists. And it’s self-evident that the grasp and the gift erodes—you can see it in various ways. In Updike it was the ear that went. Those reliably melodious sentences just dried up—schoolboy inadvertencies crept into his later prose that just wouldn’t have been there earlier on. I don’t see many exceptions to that rule.
The Dish 