1. Frasi
  2. Autori
  3. Martin Amis

Frasi di Martin Amis
pagina 3

Martin Louis Amis è uno scrittore e saggista britannico.

Figlio del prolifico scrittore Kingsley Amis, Amis è autore di alcune delle opere più importanti e conosciute della letteratura postmoderna inglese.

Profondamente influenzato, oltre che dal padre, dall'opera di Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, James Joyce ed Elmore Leonard , ha ispirato con il suo particolare ed originale stile narrativo un'intera generazione di scrittori inglesi, compresi Will Self e Zadie Smith.

I suoi romanzi più conosciuti, e maggiormente apprezzati dai critici, sono Il dossier Rachel , Altra gente. Un racconto del mistero , Money , Territori londinesi e La freccia del tempo . Quest'ultimo, scritto come autobiografia di un medico che partecipò alle torture ai danni degli Ebrei durante l'Olocausto, e che è stato candidato per Booker Prize nel 1991, fece notizia sia per la sua tecnica inusuale , sia per il suo tema.

Vive e lavora tra Londra e l'Uruguay ed è sposato in seconde nozze con la scrittrice Isabel Fonseca.

Nel 2013 propone di installare cabine telefoniche agli angoli delle strade, destinate alla eutanasia programmata degli anziani, per risolvere il problema dell'invecchiamento della popolazione nei paesi avanzati. La provocatoria proposta riceve dure critiche.

Nel 2018 è uscito il film London Fields, per la regia di Mathew Cullen, tratto dall'omonimo romanzo, a cui ha anche contribuito alla stesura della sceneggiatura. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. Agosto 1949   •   Altri nomi Martin Louis Amis
Martin Amis photo
Martin Amis: 152   frasi 0   Mi piace

Martin Amis frasi celebri

“La matematica degli scacchi è molto interessante, perché dopo 4 mosse da entrambe le parti le possibilità si contano già a miliardi. È il gioco da tavolo per eccellenza. In qualche rara occasione si intravede una combinazione che un grande maestro coglierebbe a prima vista, e improvvisamente la scacchiera sembra tremendamente ricca – sembra che brulichi di possibilità. E tutti i grandi giocatori sono animati dalla volontà di combattere: hanno tutti l'istinto del killer.”

Martin Amis

Origine: Citato in Neil MacGregor, Civiltà degli scacchi http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2012/09/04/civilta-degli-scacchi.html, la Repubblica, 4 settembre 2012.

“Non è affatto chiaro come l'idea del paradiso-via-inferno [cioè il comunismo] abbia potuto sopravvivere a un solo istante di riflessione. Proviamo a immaginare che il "paradiso" promesso da Trockij sorgesse improvvisamente dal mucchio di macerie del 1921. Sapendo che per crearlo erano state sacrificate milioni di vite, chi avrebbe voluto abitarlo? Un paradiso a quel prezzo non è un paradiso. I mezzi determinano i fini, è stato detto, ma in Urss i mezzi sono stati l'unica cosa che si sia stati in grado di raggiungere. Esiste una contraddizione dentro la contraddizione: l'utopista militante, il perfettibilizzatore, nutre già in partenza una risentita rabbia verso l'evidenza della imperfettibilità umana. Nadezda Mandel'stam parla della "satanica" arroganza dei bolscevichi. La loro è anche un'infernale insicurezza e ostilità, un'infernale disperazione.”

Martin Amis

Origine: Da Koba il Terribile, Einaudi; citato in Stenio Solinas, Che vergogna l'Europa: i crimini staliniani pesano meno della Shoah http://www.ilgiornale.it/interni/che_vergogna_leuropa_crimini_staliniani_pesano_meno_shoah/24-12-2010/articolo-id=495687, il Giornale, 24 dicembre 2010.

“La legge del 7 aprile 1935 era la cristallizzazione dello stalinismo "maturo". Cercate di immaginare la massa del guantone con cui Stalin vi colpiva in faccia, immaginate la massa.”

Martin Amis

citato ibidem

“Le armi sono come i soldi; nessuno ne ha mai abbastanza.”

Martin Amis

Origine: Da I mostri di Einstein.

“Le pallottole non possono essere chieste indietro. Non potevano non essere inventate. Ma possono essere tolte dai fucili.”

Martin Amis

da I mostri di Einstein

“Qualcuno ci sorveglia mentre scriviamo. La madre. Il maestro. Shakespeare. Dio.”

Martin Amis

Origine: Da London Fields, Vintage Books, 1991, p. 397.

Martin Amis Frasi e Citazioni

“Dove saremmo Tod e io senza il gabinetto? Dove saremmo senza tutta la spazzatura?”

Martin Amis libro La freccia del tempo

Time's Arrow

“Evidentemente è questa la caratteristica della città contemporanea. Puoi aver voglia di lavorarci. Ma nessuno si aspetta seriamente che tu ci viva.”

Martin Amis libro La freccia del tempo

Time's Arrow

Aspetto

“Senza mai guardare dove sta andando, la gente si muove attraverso qualcosa di predisposto, armata di bugie. Non vede l'ora di raggiungere luoghi dai quali è appena tornata, o si rammarica di aver fatto cose che non ha ancora fatto. Signori delle bugie e della spazzatura - di ogni sorta di merda e di spazzatura.

[…]

Lo prendiamo ancora in culo ogni mattina come tutti gli altri - ma in questi giorni la cosa finisce in un baleno.”

Martin Amis libro La freccia del tempo

Time's Arrow

“Era novembre. Gli umani si erano fatto crescere cappotti invernali e gli alti edifici tremavano nella stretta soffocante degli equilibri tra le diverse tensioni.”

Martin Amis libro La freccia del tempo

Time's Arrow

“La città - è la città che dovrà guarirli, con lame di coltello e automobili, manganelli, colpi d'arma da fuoco. I cavi allentati e le pericolose costruzioni in muratura della città telecinetica.”

Martin Amis libro La freccia del tempo

Time's Arrow

“Tod ama le folle. Nelle folle puoi essere un capo senza che nessuno se ne accorga.

[…]

Con estasi e con sollievo si annulla nell'unità più grande, nella massa incandescente”

Martin Amis libro La freccia del tempo

Time's Arrow

“Perché piangono gli uomini? Per colpa delle lotte e delle gesta e della maratona delle promozioni, perché vogliono la mamma, perché restano ciechi anche col passar del tempo, per colpa di tutte le erezioni che debbono inventarsi sul più bello dal nulla, per colpa di tutto ciò che hanno fatto. Perché non possono più essere felici o tristi – solo sbronzi o pazzi. E perché non sanno che pesci pigliare quando sono svegli.
E poi c'è l'informazione, che arriva di notte.”

Martin Amis libro The Information

The Information

Sugli pazzi , Notte , Tempo , Sugli uomini

“Quando arriva il successo per uno scrittore inglese, questi si procura una nuova macchina da scrivere. Quando il successo arriva per uno scrittore americano, si procura una nuova moglie.”

Martin Amis

Origine: Da The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America.

Inferno , Macchine , Successo

“Natale è il periodo in cui tutte le ragazze parlano solo di cose belle, di cose calde.”

Martin Amis

Origine: Da Money; citato in Aa.Vv., Pensieri di Natale, a cura di Luigi La Rosa, BUR, Milano, 2005, p. 23. ISBN 88-17-00896-6

Natale , Ragazza

“Tutti noi siamo tenuti insieme dalle parole, e quando le parole ci abbandonano non rimane più molto.”

Martin Amis

Origine: Da "L'inglese del re", in L'attrito del tempo, Einaudi, 2019, traduzione di Federica Aceto. Citato in Come polvere https://www.ilpost.it/2019/05/29/attrito-del-tempo-martin-amis/,

Martin Amis: Frasi in inglese

“Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis libro The Rachel Papers

Origine: The Rachel Papers

“The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis libro Money

Origine: Money

“Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis libro Money

Origine: Money

“I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis libro London Fields

London Fields (1989)

“What is this televisual mastery of Reagan's? It is a celebration of good intentions and unexceptional abilities. His style is one of hammy self-effacement, a wry dismay at his own limited talents and their drastic elevation.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

"Ronald Reagan" (1979)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“I have been outflanked by the culture. I am now seen as a drawling Oxonian, and a genetic elitist, who took over the family firm. People subconsciously think that I was born in 1922, wrote Lucky Jim when I was 7, and will live for at least a century. This feels odd to me, because my father was a "angry young man" and helped democratize the British novel. I'm not a toff. I'm a yob.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

"Off the Page: Martin Amis" (2003)

“What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

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

“Exploitative is the key word here. It suggests that while you are free to be as sexually miserable as you like, the moment you exchange hard cash for a copy of Playboy, you are in the pornography perpetuation business, and your misery becomes political.
The truth is that pornography is just a sad affair all around. It is there because men in their hundreds of millions want it to be there. Killing pornography is like killing the messenger. The extent to which Larkin was "dependent" on pornography should be a measure our pity, or even our sympathy. But Motion hears the beep of his political pager, and he stands to attention.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

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

“All US presidents — and all US presidential candidates — have to be religious or have to pretend to be religious. More specifically, they have to subscribe to "born again" Christianity. Bush, with his semi-compulsory prayer-breakfasts and so on, isn't pretending to be religious… We hear about the successful "Texanisation" of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

"The Palace of the End" (2003)

“Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis libro Einstein's Monsters

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

“September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

“"Einstein's Monsters," by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis libro Einstein's Monsters

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

“I'm not sure what the American convulsion at the moment is, but I get the impression that people have moved beyond political correctness there by now. But here it lingers, although much ridiculed.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

Playboy interview (2003)

“It occurs to you that Ulysses is about cliché. It is about inherited, ready-made formulations - most notably Irish Catholicism and anti-Semitism. After all, prejudices are clichés: they are secondhand hatreds... Joyce never uses a cliché in innocence.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

Review of Ulysses by James Joyce, p. 444
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“After September 11, then, writers faced quantitative change, but not qualitative change. In the following days and weeks, the voices coming from their rooms were very quiet; still, they were individual voices, and playfully rational, all espousing the ideology of no ideology. They stood in eternal opposition to the voice of the lonely crowd, which, with its yearning for both power and effacement, is the most desolate sound you will ever hear. "Desolate": "giving an impression of bleak and dismal emptiness… from L. desolat-, desolare 'abandon', from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone'."”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

“Beautifully written… the webs of imagery that Harris has so carefully woven… contains writing of which our best writers would be proud… there is not a singly ugly or dead sentence…' - or so sang the critics. Hannibal is a genre novel, and all genre novels contain dead sentences - unless you feel the throb of life in such periods as 'Tommaso put the lid back on the cooler' or 'Eric Pickford answered' or 'Pazzi worked like a man possessed' or 'Margot laughed in spite of herself' or 'Bob Sneed broke the silence.' What these commentators must be thinking of, I suppose, are the bits when Harris goes all blubbery and portentous (every other phrase a spare tyre), or when, with a fugitive poeticism, he swoons us to a dying fall: 'Starling looked for a moment through the wall, past the wall, out to forever and composed herself…' 'It seemed forever ago…' 'He looked deep, deep into her eyes…' 'His dark eyes held her whole…' Needless to say, Harris has become a serial murderer of English sentences, and Hannibal is a necropolis of prose.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

Review of Hannibal by Thomas Harris, p. 240
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“The notion of the "axis of evil" has an interesting provenance. In early drafts of the President's speech the "axis of evil" was the "axis of hatred", "axis" having been settled on for its associations with the enemy in the second world war. The "axis of hatred" at this point consisted of only two countries, Iran and Iraq. whereas of course the original axis consisted of three (Germany, Italy, Japan). It was additionally noticed that Iran and Iraq, while not both Arab, were both Muslim. So they brought in North Korea.
We may notice, in this embarras of the inapposite, that the Axis was an alliance, whereas Iran and Iraq are blood-bespattered enemies, and the zombie nation of North Korea is, in truth, so mortally ashamed of itself that it can hardly bear to show its face.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

"The Palace of the End" (2003)

“Like Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince, 'N', as he is called, uses quotation marks for such vulgarisms as 'sulks,' 'commuters' and 'worthwhile activities', as well as for phrases like 'too good to be true', 'the wrong end of the stick' and 'keep in touch.' The reader reflects that a cliché or approximation, wedged between two inverted commas, is still a cliché or approximation. Besides, you see how it would 'get on your nerves' if I were to 'go on' like this 'the whole time'…”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

Review of The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch, p. 92
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“Our best destiny, as planetary cohabitants, is the development of what has been called "species consciousness" — something over and above nationalisms, blocs, religions, ethnicities. During this week of incredulous misery, I have been trying to apply such a consciousness, and such a sensibility. Thinking of the victims, the perpetrators, and the near future, I felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

"Fear and loathing" (2001)

“[I am] secular to the bones, but not an atheist.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

Quoted in Philip Ottermann, "Beyond belief," http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2289254,00.html The Guardian (5 July 2008)

“We accept that there are legitimate casus belli: acts or situations "provoking or justifying war". The present debate feels off-centre, and faintly unreal, because the US and the UK are going to war for a new set of reasons (partly undisclosed) while continuing to adduce the old set of reasons (which in this case do not cohere or even overlap).”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

"The Palace of the End" (2003)

“Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

"Joan Didion" (1980)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

"Phantom of the Opera: The Republicans in 1988" (1988)
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993)

“As elsewhere in his writing, Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

Review of Palimpsest, p. 281
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“When you review an exhibition of paintings you don't compose a painting about it, when you review a film you don't make a film about it and when you review a new CD you don't make a little CD about it. But when you review a prose-narrative then you write a prose-narrative about that prose-narrative and those who write the secondary prose-narrative, let's face it, must have once had dreams of writing the primary prose-narrative. And so there is a kind of hierarchy of envy and all those other things.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

Interview with Ramona Koval on Radio National (4 September 1999) http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s21638.htm

“Vidal is determined to be a) in the thick of things, and b) above the fray. He knows everybody and he doesn't want to know anybody. He has had lovers by the thousand while doing 'nothing”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

deliberately, at least — to please the other.
Review of Palimpsest by Gore Vidal, p. 279
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“Bujak spoke of Einstein as if he were God's literary critic, God being a poet. I, more stolidly, tend to suspect that God is a novelist — a garrulous and deeply unwholesome one too.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis libro Einstein's Monsters

"Bujak and the Strong Force"
Einstein's Monsters (1987)

“She was sitting there beside the bookcase, trying to read, in a growing panic of self-consciousness. Why? Because reading presupposed a future.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis libro London Fields

London Fields (1989)

“The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists — haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

“A week after the attack, one is free to taste the bile of its atrocious ingenuity. It is already trite — but stringently necessary — to emphasise that such a mise en scène would have embarrassed a studio executive's storyboard or a thriller-writer's notebook ("What happened today was not credible," were the wooden words of Tom Clancy, the author of The Sum of All Fears). And yet in broad daylight and full consciousness that outline became established reality: a score or so of Stanley knives produced two million tons of rubble.”

Help us translate this quote
Martin Amis

"Fear and loathing" (2001)

Autori simili

John Galsworthy photo
John Galsworthy 6
scrittore inglese
David Foster Wallace photo
David Foster Wallace 151
scrittore e saggista statunitense
Alessandro Baricco photo
Alessandro Baricco 459
scrittore e saggista italiano
Thomas Mann photo
Thomas Mann 93
scrittore e saggista tedesco
Vladimir Vladimirovič Nabokov photo
Vladimir Vladimirovič Nabokov 82
scrittore, saggista e critico letterario russo
Cesare Pavese photo
Cesare Pavese 244
scrittore, poeta, saggista e traduttore italiano
Mario Benedetti photo
Mario Benedetti 6
poeta, saggista e scrittore uruguaiano
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse photo
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse 15
scrittore inglese
Jorge Luis Borges photo
Jorge Luis Borges 133
scrittore, saggista, poeta, filosofo e traduttore argentino
John Maxwell Coetzee photo
John Maxwell Coetzee 25
scrittore e saggista sudafricano