Martin Amis Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Hands, Long

• To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Heart, Mind

  Martin Amis (2014). “The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000”, p.15, Vintage

• It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Giving, Faithful

• I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Sound, Again And Again

• Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Dumb, Reader

• Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do - like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.

  Martin Amis

  Sexy, Dream, Writing

  "Off the Page" with Carole Burns, www.washingtonpost.com. November 7, 2003.

• It's been said that happiness writes white. It doesn't show up on the page. When you're on holiday and writing a letter home to a friend, no one wants a letter that says the food is good and the weather is charming and the accommodations comfortable. You want to hear about lost passports and rat-filled shacks.

  Martin Amis

  Home, Writing, Holiday

  "The Sadistic Muse". Interview with Laura Miller, February 10, 1998.

• We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Talking, Age

  2000 Experience.

• 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

  Writing, Hypnosis, Secret

  "Martin Amis, The Art of Fiction No. 151". Interview with Francesca Riviere, www.theparisreview.org. 1998.

• No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Abuse, Injustice

  Source: www.vulture.com

• 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.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Eye, People

• Often it doesn't occur to you what kind of novel you're writing until quite late on.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Kind, Late

  Source: www.vulture.com

• This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Wake Up, Want

• Well, my father Kingsley Amis was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it was good that I began when I was young and bold and foolish, otherwise I'd have become too self-conscious and aware of the weight of not having written anything yet.

  Martin Amis

  Father, Writing, Thinking

  "Martin Amis: I wasn’t trying to impress my father". Interview with Jane Graham, www.salon.com. July 24, 2013.

• Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Way, Talent

  "New New Yorker Martin Amis Talks Terrorism, Pornography, Idyllic Brooklyn and American Decline". Interview with David Wallace-Wells, www.vulture.com. July 22, 2012.

• You never can tell, though, with suicide notes, can you? In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides. They're like poems in that respect, suicide notes: nearly everyone tries their hand at them some time, with or without the talent. We all write them in our heads. Usually the note is the thing. You complete it, and then resume your time travel. It is the note and not the life that is cancelled out. Or the other way round. Or death. You never can tell, though, can you, with suicide notes.

  Martin Amis

  Suicide, Writing, Hands

• Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Assuming, Life Is

  "When Amis met Updike ..." by Martin Amis, www.theguardian.com. January 31, 2009.

• Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

  Martin Amis

  Mother, Teacher, Writing

  1989 London Fields, ch.1.

• You can't sort of write the novel as if you're taking dictation from heaven.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Heaven, Novel

  "New New Yorker Martin Amis Talks Terrorism, Pornography, Idyllic Brooklyn and American Decline". Interview with David Wallace-Wells, www.vulture.com. July 22, 2012.

• 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 who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

  Martin Amis

  Children, Book, Writing

  "Martin Amis: Only brain injury could make me write for children" by Benedicte Page, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2011.

• 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

  Writing, Two, Novelists

• I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.

  Martin Amis

  Kings, Writing, Giving

• Egotism exists everywhere, but it has a different flavor in England, where the tabloid culture goes much deeper. It's just the indulgence of vulgarity, the wallowing in vulgarity. As with everything English, there's a sort of irony to it. They write a great deal about these trivial people who have a certain eminence, always with a bit of, "Isn't it ridiculous that we are writing about this person?"

  Martin Amis

  Writing, People, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Register, I Can

  "Martin Amis: Only brain injury could make me write for children" by Benedicte Page, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2011.

• Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

  Martin Amis

  Block, Writing, Sound

Page 1 of 2

← Prev

1

2

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin