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
book years rewards
Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.
fun character way
It's good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don't know what he's going to do - I have to find my way.
light-years inches human-life
The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.
running dream moving
Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.
lonely i-am-lonely not-alone
So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.
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.
dream champion islam
The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists -- haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations.
reputation true-man manipulator
The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.
america world matter
America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.
wine quality screws
Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?
beautiful games perfect
Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.
mother teacher writing
Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
country self america
America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions.
writing dumb reader
Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.