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
curves careers usual
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
language terrible english-language
It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
names knows
We all have names we don't know about.
belief nonsense written
My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.
walks soulful
Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.
sexy dream writing
Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do - like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.
interviews
The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.
fiction pieces
All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.
money tea bags
I hire tea by the tea bag.
humor common-sense serious
Let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything.
addiction evil mind
Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
block writing sound
Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.
allowed class classes several task took written
Several people, not just reviewers, took me to task for writing about what they called the working classes - something I've been doing for 40 years. I thought that was contemptible - what do they want to do, ghettoize the working class as a subject? Can you only write about your own class? I've written about royalty, am I not allowed to do that?
art grow lion
Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.