Martin Amis

MARTIN AMIS

Date of Birth: August 25, 1949
Birthplace: Oxford, England
Current Residence: London, England
Education: Oxford University, B.A. (with honors), 1971.
Profession: Actor in the film A High Wind in Jamaica, 1965; editorial assistant, Times Literary Supplement, 1972-75.
Influences, Interests and Interesting Tidbits: "I always earn out my advances and I don't see why I should subsidize [Amis's] greed, simply because he has a divorce to pay for and has just had all his teeth redone."
-A.S. Byatt, 1995

[On his father, Kingsley Amis] "We're very close. It's a very enjoyable adversarial type of relationship in that we agree a lot more about literature than we do about politics, but we don't agree that  much about literature. So it's not argumentative, but close."
-Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 27 

I think every writer has felt burning hatred for other writers.
-Martin Amis, Vanity Fair, 1995

I was born on August 25, 1949: four days later, the Russians successfully tested their first atom bomb, and deterrence was in place. So I had those four carefree days...I didn't really make the most of them. I spent half the time under bubble. Even as things stood, I was born in a state of acute shock. My mother says I looked like Orson Welles in a black rage.
-Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters

As the press campaign against Amis mounted, it dawned on me that far from being passed over for the Booker Prize because he wasn't exotic enough, Amis had become a focus of hostility precisely because he had crossed over to the other side and associated too much with Americans—including...Saul Bellow—and with misfits from the other old colonies. He had become a dangerous mid-Atlantic hybrid—the papers had him shooting ' pool' in London pubs rather than playing snooker. What was more, the papers gleefully reported, he played poke with Salman Rushdie.
-Jonathan Wilson, The New Yorker