"Mr. Amis’s talent was undeniable: He was the most dazzling stylist in postwar British fiction."

"So were his swagger and Byronic good looks. He had well-chronicled involvements with some of the most watched young women of his era. He wore, according to media reports, velvet jackets, Cuban-heel boots, bespoke shirts. He stared balefully into paparazzi lenses. His raucous lunches with friends and fellow writers like Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Clive James, James Fenton and [Christopher] Hitchens were written up in the press and made other writers feel that they were on the outside looking in. He seemed to be having more fun than other people. His detractors considered him less a bad boy than a spoiled brat.... 'He was more blond than [Mick] Jagger and indeed rather shorter,' Mr. Hitchens wrote, 'but his sensuous lower lip was a crucial feature,' and 'you would always know when he had come into the room.' Mr. Amis wrote his first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' published in England in 1973, on nights and weekends. He gave himself a year to complete it. If it hadn’t panned out, he said, he might have considered academia."

From "Martin Amis, Acclaimed Author of Bleakly Comic Novels, Dies at 73 In books like “Money” and “The Information,” he created “a high style to describe low things,” as he put it. He found more renown as a critic, and a measure of unease as his famous father’s son" (NYT).

ADDED: The Guardian collects a lot of quotes by Amis. I liked:

"I feel I’m only going to write short stories and novellas from now on. Chekhov said, toward the end of his life, 'Everything I read strikes me as not short enough.' And I agree."

"In the old days it came quicker, the prose. Now it’s a battle. It’s not about coming up with striking adverbs, it’s more about removing as many uglinesses as I can find."

"What makes you a writer? You develop an extra sense that partly excludes you from experience. When writers experience things, they’re not really experiencing them anything like a hundred percent. They’re always holding back and wondering what the significance of it is, or wondering how they’d do it on the page."

AND: From the London Times:

Some thought him misanthropic, but it would probably be truer to say that he was disappointed and depressed by traits in society that, in his opinion, more and more held sway. He could see beauty and virtue lurking jointly in the shadows. He could also appreciate the rich comedy of life and the poignancy of its pretences. Yet, in the end, his was a pessimistic outlook, holding that personal progress was necessarily finite and insignificant while the universe itself, unmoved by any guiding hand, moved ineluctably towards chaos and destruction.