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Martin Amis citations
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Martin Amis, né le 25 août 1949 à Swansea, au pays de Galles, est un romancier britannique, fils de l’écrivain Kingsley Amis. Ses livres les plus connus sont Money et London Fields . Il a reçu le prix James Tait Black Memorial Prize pour son livre autobiographique Experience et a été nommé deux fois pour le Booker Prize . Amis a été jusqu’en 2011 professeur d'écriture créative au Center for New Writing de l'université de Manchester. Le Times l’a désigné en 2008 comme étant l'un des cinquante plus grands écrivains britanniques depuis 1945.

Le travail de Martin Amis se focalise sur les excès apparents de la société occidentale capitaliste, dont il perçoit et satirise l’absurdité par le grotesque et la caricature. Inspiré par Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov et James Joyce, ainsi que par son père Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis a fortement influencé à son tour des auteurs britanniques. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. août 1949  •  Autres noms Martin Louis Amis
Martin Amis photo
Martin Amis: 136 citations0 J'aime

Martin Amis: Citations en anglais

“One wonders how the literary revisionists and canon cleansers can bear to take the money. Imagine a school of sixteenth century art criticism that spent its time contently jeering at the past for not knowing about perspective.”

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Martin Amis

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

“Not greatly gifted, not deeply beautiful, Madonna tells America that fame comes from wanting it badly enough. And everyone is terribly good at badly wanting things.”

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Martin Amis

"Madonna" (1992)
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993)

“The doltish euphemism of conglomerate America.”

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Martin Amis

"Hugh Hefner" (1985)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.”

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Martin Amis

"Claus von Bülow" (1983)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending …”

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Martin Amis livre Experience

Introduction
Experience (2000)

“As it turns out, Mailer comes close to solving the mystery [of Lee Harvey Oswald], but he never establishes the tragedy. Dreiser's tale was tragic and American because it happened every day. Oswald made only one notch in the calendar. It was meaningless; he just renamed an airport, violently.
…Oswald's life was not a cry of pain so much as a squawk for attention. He achieved geopolitical significance by the shortest possible route. He was not an example of post-modern absurdity but one of its messiahs: an inspiration to the glazed loner. He killed Kennedy not to impress Jodie Foster. He killed Kennedy to impress Clio - the muse of history.”

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Martin Amis

Review of Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery by Norman Mailer, p. 277
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“It would be inaccurate to say that John Fowles is a middlebrow writer who sometimes hopes he is a highbrow: it has never occurred to him to believe otherwise. There is a difference, morally.”

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Martin Amis

Opening lines of his review of Mantissa by John Fowles, p. 138
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“It isn't that the beau monde was too big for Capote's talents. The beau monde was too small for Capote's talents. Here, at least, in human terms the Very Rich are very poor. Interestingly, they are not interesting; incredibly, they are not even credible. They are certainly not the 'unspoiled monsters' of Capote's chapter title: they are spoiled mediocrities, they are boring freaks. The backgammon bums, the sweating champagne buckets, 'the Racquet Club, Le Jockey, the Links, White's', 'Lafayette, The Colony, La Grenouille, La Caravelle', 'Vuitton cases, Battistoni shirts, Lanvin suits, Peal shoes': how keen can a writer afford to be on all this?”

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Martin Amis

Review of "Answered Prayers" by Truman Capote, p. 311
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.”

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Martin Amis livre Experience

Part I: Failures of Tolerance
Experience (2000)

“In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.”

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Martin Amis

"Gore Vidal" (1977)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“If people have personal conversations about very emotional matters in public, and people reveal parts of their body that were originally kept covered, and pornography is becoming semi-respectable, it makes you think the push for greater freedom and divesting yourself of inhibitions is a real human need. I'm 54, so I'm further back upon the road. We certainly did a fair amount of divesting ourselves of inhibitions, but there seems to have been a quantum leap in the last half a generation. Maybe we're destined to be freer, but it's taking odd forms, like showing your big gut to all the world and discussing the future of your marriage at a bus stop with 30 people listening in.”

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Martin Amis

Playboy interview (2003)

“Sex has become much more competitive, with the girls becoming sort of predators as well. It's ferocious.”

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Martin Amis

Playboy interview (2003)

“Of obvious appeal to the humourless is the writer who comes on stage in a clown outfit or King Kong suit, with party hat and harem slippers, with banana skins and custard pies… It remains a sound rule that funny journalism can only flourish as the offshoot or sideline of something larger. No funny journalist who is that and nothing more will ever write anything lastingly funny.”

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Martin Amis

Review of The Best of Modern Humour edited by Mordecai Richler, p. 364
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“Our vulgar delight in American vulgarity.”

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Martin Amis

"The New Evangelists" (1980)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“Tell a dream, lose a reader, said Henry James. Joyce told a dream, Finnegans Wake, and he told it in puns - cornily but rightly regarded as the lowest form of wit. This showed fantastic courage, and fantastic introversion. The truth is Joyce didn't love the reader, as you need to do. Well, he gave us Ulysses, incontestably the central modernist masterpiece; it is impossible to conceive of any future novel that might give the form such a violent evolutionary lurch. You can't help wondering, though. Joyce could have been the most popular boy in school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher's pet.”

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Martin Amis

Review of Ulysses, p. 446
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“No one in the history of the written word, not even William MacGonagall, or Spike Milligan or D. H. Lawrence, is so wide open to damaging quotation. Try this, more or less at random: 'A murderer in the moment of his murder could feel a sense of beauty and perfection as complete as the transport of a saint.' Or this: Film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long. His italics.
On every page Mailer will come up with a formulation both grandiose and crass. This is expected of him. It is also expected of the reviewer to introduce a lingering 'yet' or 'however' at some point, and say that 'somehow' Mailer's 'fearless honesty' redeems his notorious excesses. He isn't frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn't frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn't frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses. Perhaps he ought to be a little less frightened of being frightened.”

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Martin Amis

Review of The Essential Mailer by Norman Mailer, p. 267
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction. I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled.”

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Martin Amis

"Introduction"
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don’t want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.”

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Martin Amis livre Einstein's Monsters

"Introduction: Thinkability"
Einstein's Monsters (1987)

“Does screen violence provide a window or a mirror? Is it an effect or a cause, an encouragement, a facilitation? Fairly representatively, I think, I happen to like screen violence while steadily execrating its real-life counterpart. Moreover, I can tell the difference between the two. One is happening, one is not.”

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Martin Amis

Review of Hollywood vs. America by Michael Medved, p. 16
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.”

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Martin Amis livre Einstein's Monsters

"Introduction: Thinkability"
Einstein's Monsters (1987)

“While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw - that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedy; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75 per cent of the whole), inhumanly dull…. Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 - the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right: not tears of relief but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.”

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Martin Amis

Opening paragraph of his review of The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Tobias Smollett
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“Bly is a poet, he is a big cat, so to speak, and not some chipmunk from the how-to culture. But it is the how-to culture that has picked up on his book. … And yet, for a while Iron John transformed male consciousness in the United States. The wild men weekends and initiation, adventure holidays and whatnot, which were big business, may prove to be ephemeral. But what does one make of the unabashed references in the press to "men's liberation" and the men's movement and the fact that there are now at least half a dozen magazines devoted to nothing else? Changing men, journeymen, man. … Bly's average reader is not a poet and a critic, but a weightlifter from Brooklyn.”

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Martin Amis

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

“Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.”

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Martin Amis

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

“Iron John, a short work of psychological, literary and anthropological speculation by the poet Robert Bly, dominated the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year and made, as we shall see, a significant impact on many aspects of American life. In England, it made no impression whatever. … We are British over in Britain, we are skeptical, ironical, et cetera, and are not given, as Americans are, to seeking expert advice on basic matters. Especially such matters as our manhood. In England, maleness itself has become an embarrassment: male consciousness, male pride, male rage, we don't want to hear about.”

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Martin Amis

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

“Kingsley fell over. And this was no brisk trip or tumble. It was an act of colossal administration. First came a kind of slow-leak effect, giving me the immediate worry that Kingsley, when fully deflated, would spread out into the street on both sides of the island, where there were cars, trucks, sneezing buses. Next, as I grabbed and tugged, he felt like a great ship settling on its side: would it right itself, or go under? Then came an impression of overall dissolution and the loss of basic physical coherence. I groped around him, looking for places to shore him up, but every bit of him was falling, dropping, seeking the lowest level, like a mudslide.”

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Martin Amis livre Experience

Part II: One Little More Hug
Experience (2000)

“On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational — to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.”

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Martin Amis

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

“Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth's poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics — his attitude to the poor, say, or his unconscious 'valorization' of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped.”

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Martin Amis

Foreword, p. xii
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes — homosexuality, sexual disease, and death — about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.”

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Martin Amis

"Making Sense of AIDS" (1985)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“His last words were spoken to a woman, to the nurse who was holding his hand. Perhaps we all have the last words ready when we go into the last room. Perhaps the thing about last words is not how good they are, but whether we can get them out. What Larkin said faintly was, "I'm going to the inevitable."”

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Martin Amis

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

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