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
interesting negative subjects
I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.
play hours lost
When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
littles venus closure
Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.
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.
writing way talent
Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing.
time dimensions humans
Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.
shadow ifs bits
Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.
time fighting numbers
You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal
stuff sometimes broads
I sometimes feel I'm a sort of cult writer, rather than a mainstream writer, in that those who like my stuff like it a lot, but the appeal is not that broad.
past forgotten unforgettable
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
dream sleep night
Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.
style fixed cruelty
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
daughter years issues
My 12-year-old daughter said to me, "Enough with the subtitles, Daddy, for crying out loud." Because they always seem to cloud the issue rather than clarify it.
paper facts
My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.