Quotes by Martin Amis

About Martin Amis:

Martin Louis Amis is an English novelist. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). 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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Martin Amis

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

Martin Amis

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure...

Martin Amis

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.

Martin Amis

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.

Martin Amis

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.

Martin Amis

If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.

Martin Amis

Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.

Martin Amis

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.

Martin Amis

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

Martin Amis

You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.

Martin Amis

The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.

Martin Amis

It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can’t respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubat...

Martin Amis

Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who you really were. The wizard couldn’t look at it wi...

Martin Amis

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out ...

Martin Amis

I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bare to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there's nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won't see any reason not to do you harm.

Martin Amis

Now I have to lie on the bed for a few minutes and let the solitude gather round me once more.

Martin Amis

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.

Martin Amis

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 som...

Martin Amis

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

Martin Amis

A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you...

Martin Amis

Author Bio

  • NameMartin Amis
  • DescriptionBritish novelist
  • BornAugust 25, 1949
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionNovelist; Science Fiction Writer; Short Story Writer; University Professor; Memoirist; Writer
  • AwardsJames Tait Black Memorial Prize