Martin Amis Quotes

#1. ... I was soon wondering if I would ever again be able to attend a mass assemblage without my mind starting to play tricks on me. It wasn't like the last occasion, when I became gradually immersed in the logistical challenge of gassing the audience. No.

Martin Amis

#2. Yeah,' I said and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.

Martin Amis

#3. Marriage is always something of a compromise, as I'm sure you're now aware. Any long-term relationship is - and one does have to see it in the long term, Charles. No, I expect your mother and myself will never divorce. It's uneconomic and, at my age, usually unnecessary.

Martin Amis

#4. Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

Martin Amis

#5. Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.

Martin Amis

#6. I would say I'm an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just turn up the volume dial. Which is a technique of science fiction, apart from anything else.

Martin Amis

#7. Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

Martin Amis

#8. There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.

Martin Amis

#9. One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.

Martin Amis

#10. When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don't say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.

Martin Amis

#11. In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

Martin Amis

#12. And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

Martin Amis

#13. You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?

Martin Amis

#14. The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.

Martin Amis

#15. These days he smoked and drank largely to solace himself for what drinking and smoking had done to him, so he drank and smoked a lot. He experimented, furthermore, with pretty well any other drug he could get his hands on,

Martin Amis

#16. Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing.

Martin Amis

#17. The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they're taking us where we don't want to go.

Martin Amis

#18. As I now see it, America had no business involving itself in a series of distant convulsions where the ideas, variously interpreted, of a long-dead German economist were bringing biblical calamity to China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Martin Amis

#19. No-one is going to sit down and read Bleak House to the family any more, but they can all huddle up happily in front of Charles Bronson.

Martin Amis

#20. It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.

Martin Amis

#21. What could never be endured, it turned out, was the last swathe of time before sleep came, the path from larger day to huger night, a little death when the mind was still alive and fluttering. Thus

Martin Amis

#22. I don't think I've ever been particularly scared of death - but scared of dying, the process. It doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.

Martin Amis

#23. My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.

Martin Amis

#24. 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.

Martin Amis

#25. When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a long time before you can really say you're a writer. You've got to stand the test of time, which is the only real test there is.

Martin Amis

#26. [Describing the soap in the gulag] It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation.

Martin Amis

#27. Heat, money, sex and fever -this is it, this is New York, this is first class, this is the sharp end.

Martin Amis

#28. I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

Martin Amis

#29. The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was 'better' than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America.

Martin Amis

#30. Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is ... to impress your personality on the road.

Martin Amis

#31. I want incremental improvements. There's the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general - it's dreadful.

Martin Amis

#32. Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?

Martin Amis

#33. You can't sort of write the novel as if you're taking dictation from heaven.

Martin Amis

#34. In my world, reserved Italians, heterosexual hairdressers, clouds without silver linings, ignoble savages, hard-hearted whores, advantageous ill-winds, sober Irishmen, and so on, are not permitted to exist.

Martin Amis

#35. It is straightforward - and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

Martin Amis

#36. At the age of twenty, his artistic dreams frustrated, Hitler was a tramp: park benches, soup queues. Given just a little more talent, perhaps, he would have killed himself, not in the bunker, but in a cosy little studio in Klagenfurt.

Martin Amis

#37. He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by the god called Time? It won't be that convulsive, heart-bursting spell between twenty-eight and thirty-five. No. It'll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three.

Martin Amis

#38. Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.

Martin Amis

#39. Give the reader hell. Stretch the reader.

Martin Amis

#40. So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.

Martin Amis

#41. Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

Martin Amis

#42. How incredibly avaricious the whole operation was, the way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half price for children ... It was a kind of exploration of evil. Just how bad can we get?

Martin Amis

#43. ... This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.

Martin Amis

#44. It's possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Great, what do atheists shout when they do it?

Martin Amis

#45. They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.

Martin Amis

#46. Pain is nature's way of telling us that something is wrong. Patiently, pain goes on telling us this, long after we've got the message.

Martin Amis

#47. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.

Martin Amis

#48. It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.

Martin Amis

#49. Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness.

Martin Amis

#50. With the flat smile of the deeply inconvenienced.

Martin Amis

#51. It's without doubt my main subject. The way masculinity can go wrong. And I'm something of a gynocrat in a utopian kind of way.

Martin Amis

#52. You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.

Martin Amis

#53. I'm not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I'm 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle - that's what fiction is, and should be.

Martin Amis

#54. The night was electric - The night was in italics.

Martin Amis

#55. I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

Martin Amis

#56. People who go to the Opera, they don't go to the toilet, not even at home.

Martin Amis

#57. You use a different part of your heart with girls.

Martin Amis

#58. Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.

Martin Amis

#59. Laughter always forgives.

Martin Amis

#60. Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences.

Martin Amis

#61. He could take one look at me- at the ashtray, the bottle, the four pots of coffee, my face, and my gut set like a stone on the white band of the towel- he could take one look at me and be pretty sure i ran on heavy fuel.

Martin Amis

#62. When I wrote 'The Pregnant Widow' three or four years ago, I tried to reread my first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' because their young heroes are the same age. I couldn't finish it. It seemed to me so technically slapdash and weak.

Martin Amis

#63. In bereavement, make yourself better, not bitter.

Martin Amis

#64. And now, at dusk, outside my window, the trees shake their heads like disco dancers in the strobe lights of nightlife long ago.

Martin Amis

#65. Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Khrushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: 'He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones.

Martin Amis

#66. We took the simple step of illegalising all opposition. And the autobahn to autocracy lay clear.

Martin Amis

#67. I think a lot of people who read fiction are interested in subtlety. But they wouldn't like my stuff. It's a bit too violent for many tastes.

Martin Amis

#68. You can't be up the reader's ass, as many a writer I think is - cute as hell, ingratiating as hell. But that's not loving the reader in the right way. That's toadying to the reader.

Martin Amis

#69. Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

Martin Amis

#70. We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

Martin Amis

#71. Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.

Martin Amis

#72. No longer can I bear with the ruined god, betrayed and beaten by his own magic. Calling on powers best left unsummoned, he took human beings apart - and then he put them back together again.

Martin Amis

#73. When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.

Martin Amis

#74. Now I have to lie on the bed for a few minutes and let the solitude gather round me once more.

Martin Amis

#75. I've got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I've got to get my system out of my system. That's what I've got to do.

Martin Amis

#76. Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.

Martin Amis

#77. Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.

Martin Amis

#78. When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

Martin Amis

#79. If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.

Martin Amis

#80. Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions.

Martin Amis

#81. Maybe love will be like driving. When people move - when they travel - they look where they've come from, not where they're going.

Martin Amis

#82. In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people.

Martin Amis

#83. No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

Martin Amis

#84. Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.

Martin Amis

#85. Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving. I'm not the station, I'm not the stop: I'm the train. I'm the train.

Martin Amis

#86. Every day, the dispensing of existence ... Its face is fierce and distant and ancient.

Martin Amis

#87. I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: 'Well. Shakespeare looked like shit.' It works wonders.

Martin Amis

#88. I can imagine in a century or two that rule by women will be seen as a better bet than rule by men. What's wrong with men is that they tend to look for the violent solution. Women don't.

Martin Amis

#89. The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)

Martin Amis

#90. I sometimes feel I'm a sort of cult writer, rather than a mainstream writer, in that those who like my stuff like it a lot, but the appeal is not that broad.

Martin Amis

#91. Beauty, extreme yet ambiguously available; this very roughly, was what Nicola's entrance to the Black Cross had said to Keith. But he didn't know the nature
he didn't know the brand
of the availability.

Martin Amis

#92. America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.

Martin Amis

#93. Is that why the parents of dead children spend half the rest of their lives in darkened rooms? Are they hoping the ghosts will return with all their original power? She

Martin Amis

#94. He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this; had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.

Martin Amis

#95. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

Martin Amis

#96. The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.

Martin Amis

#97. He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.

Martin Amis

#98. The hot macadam pulled on his shoes, like desire ...

Martin Amis

#99. Once, as he inhaled with his customary vehemence, I had a thought that made my armpits come alive.

Martin Amis

#100. When I see a lot of young faces in the audience, it's just sort of sinking in how important that is. Because you're old enough now to identify them very strongly as being young - whereas before, of course they were young, because you were young. Now it's not like that.

Martin Amis