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
father writing thinking
Well, my father [Kingsley Amis] was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it was good that I began when I was young and bold and foolish, otherwise I'd have become too self-conscious and aware of the weight of not having written anything yet.
sight dimensions conventions
Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions.
writing eye people
Seeing the world anew, as if it were new, is as old as writing. It's what all painters are trying to do, to see what's there, to see it in a way that renews it. It becomes more and more urgent as the planet gets worn flat and forest after forest is slain to print the paper for people's impressions to be scrawled down on. It becomes harder and harder to be original, to see things with an innocent eye. Innocence is much tied up with it. As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to see it.
character writing paper
The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
children class evil
How incredibly avaricious the whole operation was, the way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half price for children.... It was a kind of exploration of evil. Just how bad can we get?
father england resentment
There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.
faces fierce ancient
Every day, the dispensing of existence.... Its face is fierce and distant and ancient.
fighting aggressors
In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
interesting negative subjects
I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.
stupid intelligent thinking
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.
priorities nuclear target
What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.
principles kind pleasure
When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don't say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.
kings writing giving
I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.
race nuclear arms
The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.