Martin Amis Quotes

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.

All nonmimetic fiction is a balancing act between 'reality' and the obviously unreal, with no attempt by the author to make the latter seem like the former. Sometimes it's not an easy tightrope to walk. But when it succeeds, such fiction can brilliantly illuminate the human condition.

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.

I am a comic writer, which means I get to slay the dragons, and shoot the bull.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

When you write scripts, it begins to feel like you're living in them.