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 doubt announcements
My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.
suicide thinking long-ago
It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think that's true-unless it isn't true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward-shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It's a mess in there.
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.
laughter forgiving
Laughter always forgives.
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.
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.
believe men thinking
On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational -- to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.
months may my-friendship
My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May,
moving games chess
Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)
want wanted reader
He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.
cinema literature concern
Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.
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.
men age faces
It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.
suffering serious flaws
While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw--that of outright unreadability.