The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it’s not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I’ve met, and think they’re incredibly witty, inventive – there’s a lot of poetry there. – Martin Amis
Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist – in other words, my mother did it all. – Martin Amis
Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun. – Martin Amis
When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise. – Martin Amis
All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father’s peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on ‘defamatory.’ – Martin Amis
The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head. – Martin Amis
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
All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work – or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say. – Martin Amis
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. – Martin Amis
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
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
Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, ‘Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.’ – Martin Amis
In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor. – Martin Amis
Watching an adaptation of your novel can be a violent experience: seeing your old jokes suddenly thrust at you can be alarming. But I started to enjoy ‘Money’ very quickly, and then I relaxed. – Martin Amis
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 the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. – Martin Amis
It’s an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That’s an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise – except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle. – Martin Amis
Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time. – Martin Amis
Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy. – Martin Amis
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. 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