I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel,… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
“Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time’s arrow moves the other way.” — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside,… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
Dickens is a much misunderstood and mis-approached writer, in that he tends to be read, particularly in the twentieth century, as a… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence.… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
Well, my father Kingsley Amis was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
Egotism exists everywhere, but it has a different flavor in England, where the tabloid culture goes much deeper. It's just the indulgence… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
Seeing the world anew, as if it were new, is as old as writing. It's what all painters are trying to do,… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites.… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way.… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there.… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
“Yeah,' I said and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.” — Martin Amis Copy Share
“barrios; each barrio has two or three gangs, and all the gangs are theoretically” — Martin Amis Copy Share
I'm not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I'm 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle - that's what… — Martin Amis Copy Share
“If we all downed tools and joined hands for ten minutes and stopped believing in money, then money would no longer exist. We never… — Martin Amis Copy Share
When I see a lot of young faces in the audience, it's just sort of sinking in how important that is. Because you're old… — Martin Amis Copy Share
“I was informed by my viscera that now was the time to put my arm around her shoulders. I ignored them.” — Martin Amis Copy Share
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… — Martin Amis Copy Share
In her final months Princess Diana was being shat upon by the tabloids -- basically for sleeping with an Arab. When she died, these… — Martin Amis Copy Share
If you feel you have a strong constituency among the young, you can really die happy, because the great unanswered question, the only valid… — Martin Amis Copy Share
My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived. — Martin Amis Copy Share
I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of… — Martin Amis Copy Share
The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice… — Martin Amis Copy Share
“There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics [notably the lower clergy] for… — Martin Amis Copy Share
