Martin Amis

From Philosopedia

Amis, Martin (25 August 1949 - )

• Like God, nuclear weapons are free creations of the human mind. Unlike God, nuclear weapons are real.

- "Thinkability," an introductory essay in Einstein's Monsters, a collection of stories about a world where nuclear war is commonplace.

The son of Kingsley Amis, Martin is a novelist and journalist whose first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), was written when he was twenty-one. He has also written Dead Babies (1975), Other People (1981), Money (1984), Time's Arrows (1991), The Information (1995), and Night Train (1997). In addition he has written many short stories and much literary journalism.

In an interview in London's Daily Telegraph (13 May 2000), he was quoted as saying he

• has recently stopped thinking of himself as an atheist and has come to see the importance, as he gets older, of having a spiritual dimension to his life. "Now I say that I am an agnostic. People think that's pusillanimous and covering your bets. But it's not based on any belief or yearning for an afterlife but on the fact that we actually know so little about the cosmos. It is a tribute to the complexity and, at our present stage of development."