Martin Amis was born 25 August 1949, and died 19 May 2023.
Five Quotes
- Seeing the world anew, as if it were new, is as old as writing. It’s what all painters are trying to do, to see what’s there, to see it in a way that renews it. It becomes more and more urgent as the planet gets worn flat and forest after forest is slain to print the paper for people’s impressions to be scrawled down on. It becomes harder and harder to be original, to see things with an innocent eye. Innocence is much tied up with it. As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to see it.
- Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life.
- The trouble with life … Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental, and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning; and the same ending.
- All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.
- 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.
Read: Martin Amis’s 16 Rules For Writers
Martin Amis was a British novelist, best-known for the novels novels Money and London Fields. He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was listed for the Booker Prize twice.
Source for Image: Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Martin_amis_2014.jpg
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