Martin Amis Quotes

A lot of my characters are born out of a small grain in a person that I heighten and take to that next level. They're not based on anyone I've ever met, but they are these extreme versions of something.

A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

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

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

Sometimes my lyrics may describe a situation that happened to a friend. Other times, I create a story from the ground up.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

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

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

First, I would find an object which I would think is suitable for my characters and stories, then write about it, and in the end, I ended up with a house full of thousands of objects.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

As far as subject matter, I'd say most of the songs aren't that personal to me. I love making up characters and kind of having fun in a different kind of way.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

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

In my head, at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters' lives, glimpses of their secrets, obstacles to their dreams... all arrive unbidden when I'm getting cash at the ATM, walking my son to camp, singing a hymn at a wedding.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

In the case of the 'Saint' movie, I did do some research. I visited a few shelters. But usually, my stuff just comes out. I don't have any control over that.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.