Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.
Martin Amis
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Martin Amis
Age: 75
Memoirist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Abertawe
Martin Louis Amis
Like
Ebony
Refutation
Denial
Air
Idea
Light
Ideas
More quotes by Martin Amis
I would say I'm an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just turn up the volume dial. Which is a technique of science fiction, apart from anything else.
Martin Amis
It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.
Martin Amis
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.
Martin Amis
Style isn't something added on it's intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life.
Martin Amis
Style is not neutral it gives moral directions.
Martin Amis
I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.
Martin Amis
It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.
Martin Amis
No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.
Martin Amis
You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren't many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can't work.
Martin Amis
Saul Bellow says, funny enough, what French think of your work is tremendously important. And it is. It's more than what the Italians, the Spanish, and the Germans think. Somehow it's still got that cultural primacy. I feel that too: to get praised in France is better than to get praised anywhere else.
Martin Amis
Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.
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 trouble with life is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. 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.
Martin Amis
My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.
Martin Amis
Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.
Martin Amis
How incredibly avaricious the whole operation was, the way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half price for children.... It was a kind of exploration of evil. Just how bad can we get?
Martin Amis
Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.
Martin Amis
So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.
Martin Amis
When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.
Martin Amis
In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
Martin Amis