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
laughter forgiving
Laughter always forgives.
pain limits
Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.
laughter book bully
Amis is acutely, vibrantly sensitive to the different registers of laughter. He knows that it can be the most affirming and uniquely human sound, and also the most sinister and animalistic one. He understands every note of every octave that separates the liberating shout of mirth from the cackle of a bully or the snigger of a sadist.
sex thinking achievement
It's tremendously important how you get on with the other sex. Your life record on that is incredibly important. You never really think about any of your other achievements.
want wanted reader
He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.
writing heaven novel
You can't sort of write the novel as if you're taking dictation from heaven.
typewriters new-life acquire
When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.
writing thinking choices
Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.
sex wonder allotments
Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief.
ideas light air
The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.
hands careers america
America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.
might
Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.
suffering serious flaws
While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw--that of outright unreadability.
strong unanswered-questions lasts
If you feel you have a strong constituency among the young, you can really die happy, because the great unanswered question, the only valid value judgment is whether you're going to last, and that tells you that you are, for a bit at least.