Poets & Writers Theater

“Don’t waste your life reading stuff that isn’t giving you pleasure.” In this 2020 CBS Mornings interview with cohost Jeff Glor, novelist Martin Amis talks candidly about his deep friendships with writers, grief and death, and his autobiographical novel Inside Story (Knopf, 2020). Amis died at the age of seventy-three on May 19, 2023.

This video, from 2008, features British novelist Martin Amis discussing the "war on clichés" and the importance of staying faithful to a writer's literary perceptions.

"Irony just brushes past a question and leaves you with a thought about it," says Martin Amis. "Satire is meant to be much more vigorous and vehement, the suggestion being that you actually want to change reality—you're agitating for change." A paperback edition of the British novelist's satiric novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England, was published by Vintage last month.