Actually, two quotes from Kingsley Amis on popular and serious literature

I have been reading Zachary Leader’s vast biography of Kingsley Amis (The Life of Kingsley Amis, 2006).  Amis had a strong interest in popular, or “genre” fiction, and he wrote books about science fiction and about Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.  Here are two quotations from the latter book, The James Bond Dossier (1965):  “I think wish fulfilment is a common and normal human activity.  I find self-advertised maturity, pride in maturity, at least equally suspect.  No adult ought to feel an adult all the time.”  And even in works of anti-escapist, ‘serious’ literature,  Amis argues that a process of compensation is at work: “one of the qualities that took us to it in the first place is its implicit assurance that life is coherent and meaningful, and I can think of no more escapist notion than that.”