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
artist car insanity
He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this; had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.
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.
spiritual needs wounds
Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.
neurosis noise sound
Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.
writing talking age
We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.
cinema literature concern
Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.
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.
writing two different
All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.
writing holiday home
It's been said that happiness writes white. It doesn't show up on the page. When you're on holiday and writing a letter home to a friend, no one wants a letter that says the food is good and the weather is charming and the accommodations comfortable. You want to hear about lost passports and rat-filled shacks.
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.
character mind pages
When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.
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.
changed novel i-can
No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.