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Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

Martin Amis

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Martin Amis
Age: 75
Memoirist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Abertawe
Martin Louis Amis
Philosopher
Twenties
Quickly
Late
Senility
Face
Philosophers
Age
Novelists
Faces
Often
Professional

More quotes by Martin Amis

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I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.
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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.
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When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.
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You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks.
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I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.
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It's often said of American politics that it's a huge juggernaut and the president can change the direction by two or three degrees in either direction, but not much more. In fact, I think the president's power is limited, much more than the prime minister in England.
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The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.
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...So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answered everywhere you looked, in every headline and haircut: if, at any moment, nothing might matter, then who said that nothing didn't matter already?
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For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.
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Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.
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So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.
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Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.
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All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.
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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.
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Has it ever happened to you...? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you're going to remember that moment for the rest of your life.
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My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.
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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.
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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 and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.
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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.
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When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
Martin Amis