Martin Amis

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.