A Quote by Martin Amis
I had my yob periods. Nothing violent but certainly loutish. I think it's frustrated intelligence. Imagine that if you were really intelligent and everyone treated you as though you were stupid and no one tried to teach you anything -- the sort of deep subliminal rage that would get going in you. But then once it gets going, you make a strength out of what you know is your weakness, which is that you are undeveloped.
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Weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength. You don't know where you are going or why you are going, go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you, any more than if you were a corpse.
I present the thing we're going to do as a simple starting point. They all know it's an art piece and that it's all going to be recorded. And I have never had an experience where one of these men tried to take advantage of the situation. If they were guilty of anything it was of being lonely. It was never that they were violent or dangerous.
But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.
I think a good quarterback or a good linebacker, a good safety, even though you have a lot of bodies moving out there, it slows down for them and they can really see it. Then there are other guys that it's a lot of guys moving and they don't see anything. It's like being at a busy intersection, just cars going everywhere. The guys that can really sort it out, they see the game at a slower pace and can really sort out and decipher all that movement, which is hard. But experience certainly helps that, yes.
September 11 definitely opened our eyes, but when I was 19 or whatever on the last record, we just didn't care about anything. We were too young to care about anything. And then as you get older, you don't really have any excuse to be stupid anymore, to be in the dark. That just kind of opened everyone's eyes (which I probably wish it did to more people) that there's obviously something wrong, to try and figure out what it is and what's going on in the world.
I've made movies that were adaptations and I've been kind of frustrated by the process because, you know that old axiom, 'It's never as good as the book'? It's often true because nothing competes with your own imagination. When you're reading a book and you imagine something in your head, nothing's going to compete with that.
In the old days when I first was coming up, you would turn up on set in the morning with your coffee, script, and hangover and you would figure out what you were going to do with the day and how you were going to play the scenes. You would rehearse and then invite the crew in to watch the actors go through the scenes. The actors would go away to makeup and costume and the director and the DP would work out how they were going to cover what the actors had just done.
Once upon a time, if you were going to get a loan from me, I would have had to look at your file, and I would have to make a decision about whether youre going to get a loan. Maybe we would meet and talk about it. There would be some level of human involvement and human interaction. Now, a lot of this is determined by an algorithm.
I think going into space would be like going deep into the ocean, like 5,000 meters down. When you go down that far, it's just awfully black. There's not much there except mud and some particles. I imagine space would be a similar thing. The only difference is you're hoping to bump into some sort of intelligent extraterritorial being.
When you do laugh, open your mouth wide enough for the noise to get out without squealing, throw your head back as though you were going to be shaved, hold on to your false hair with both hands and then laugh till your soul gets thoroughly rested.
I had long periods where I couldn't make things happen, and then periods of enormous good luck. I guess the trick is to keep going in the periods when you're not lucky, when your stars are not aligned.
Once you've created an intelligence so smart, the real job of that intelligence is to protect itself from other intelligences becoming more intelligent than it. It's just kind of like human beings. The way you look at money or the way you look at the success of your child, you always want to make sure that as far as it gets, it can protect itself and continue forward. So I think any type of intelligence, no matter what it is, is going to have this very basic principle to protect the power that it has gained.
We had to do something at [a festival in Washington, D.C.]. I remember Chris Martin, by then we all knew him, there were certain people who were regulars. He would say, "Oh, my God, you guys, I think I'm going to throw up." It was a daytime festival, and they went on right after some really heavy band, and he was saying, "I don't think I can do this. I think I'm going to throw up." He was in the bathroom thinking he was going to be sick. He said, "They're going to hate us." In fact, they hated them. They hated Coldplay - did not go over well. His instincts were correct.
Can you imagine what it would be like to know that your life was just going to be a series of days that were all the same, that were do-overs?
These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.
I've had to really teach myself that when you're not feeling it, you shouldn't write anything down because you're going to end up coming back and re-writing it later. Whereas, if you write when you're feeling something, when you're really in the streak, then that's when you're going to get your best stuff.
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