(b. 1949– )
Welsh-born English novelist
Martin Amis
The age of the literary correspondence is dying, slowly but surely electrocuted by the superconductors of high modernity. This expiration was locked into certainty about 20 years ago; and although William Trevor and V.S. Naipaul, say, may yet reward us, it already sounds fogeyish to reiterate that, no, we won’t be seeing, and we won’t be wanting to see, the selected faxes and e-mails, the selected texts and tweets of their successors.
His review of Philip Larkin’s Letters to Monica, Guardian, October 23, 2010.
My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.
“Martin Amis: You Ask The Questions,” The Independent, January 15, 2007.
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.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. III (New York: Picador, 2008), 345–46.
You know that the very act of retyping will involve you in thirty or forty little improvements per page. If you don’t retype, you are denying that page those improvements.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. III (New York: Picador, 2008), 349.