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
language terrible english-language
It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
believe democracy matter
If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.
heart two soul
You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?
assuming life-is turns
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
taken waiting done
You know, I wouldn’t have done this a month ago. I wouldn’t have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now I’m just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They have to go ahead and happen. You watch – you wait… Things still happen here and something is waiting to happen to me. I can tell. Recently my life feels like a bloodcurdling joke. Recently my life has taken on *form* Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting – any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.
writing register i-can
I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write,
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.
mother father years
Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.
fashion thinking half
It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.
country average ideas
It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.
mother father impossible
It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.
hero class america
In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.
awards firsts first-time
I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.
men youth
They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.