"Nothing Odd Works Long"

"I find that I've stuck to a rule - you don't have rules when you write, you just have an inkling. Nabokov calls it a pang. The process of writing is finding out more about that idea or that pang. When you come to the end of the first draft you go back and start again, and you're amazed by how little you knew about it…My rule - I see Henry James came up with the same idea - is that nothing odd works long. And I find my short stories are very bizarre. I wrote a short story called The Janitor on Mars. Now, I wouldn't have written a novel called that."

- Martin Amis, at a New Yorker Festival discussion