Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amisis a British novelist. His best-known novels are Moneyand London Fields. He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date. Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 August 1949
witty thinking class
I love the working class, and everyone from it that I've met, and think they're incredible witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there. A lot of rough stuff as well. What there is, too, is an awful lot of expressiveness and intelligence and originality down there. And a lot of thwarted intelligence.
weapons enough arms-race
Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
love black world
Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
rain eye climbing
when the sky is as grey as this - impeccably grey, a denial, really of the very concept of colour - and the stooped millions lift their heads, it's hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more then the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes.
children love-you character
It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.
witty thinking class
The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.
doubt way kind
It's without doubt my main subject. The way masculinity can go wrong. And I'm something of a gynocrat in a utopian kind of way.
eye tears cinema
I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)
writing heart mind
To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.
usual six alarms
He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
teaching thinking looks
I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.
love-is men blind
Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .
giving style moral
Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.
addiction culture twins
Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.