Top 100 Amis Quotes
#1. Death has this much to be said for it: You don't have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you - free. - Kingsley Amis
Christopher Hitchens
#2. I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.
Jeanette Winterson
#3. Money by Martin Amis. I read it when I was 15, I read it hundreds of times since then and it always makes me laugh. Amis has managed to create a world that is both funny and abrasive. I'd love to play John Self, the depraved hero, who's without illusions, he created.
Robert Pattinson
#4. I don't hate humanity and I'm not interested in people who do. Although, it's funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do. Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret. 'London Fields' is one of my favorite books ever. And it's indefensible! But he's so funny ... I forgive him everything.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#5. Amis is a force unto himself There is, quite simply, no one else like him.
Jonathan Yardley
#6. Sex was like Disneyland to him: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief." Martin Amis
Young
#7. Beyond all judgments of good and bad ... is perfection - Vivian Amis
Vivian Amis
#8. The Electroshock Novelist: The Alluring Bad Boy of Literary England Has Always Been Fascinated by Britain's Dustbin Empire. Now Martin Amis Takes On American Excess,
Sam Tanenhaus
#9. I've always suffered from being labelled a horror writer - just because I didn't go to university, just because I still talk in my natural voice, just because I'm not as articulate as Martin Amis.
James Herbert
#10. It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.)
Christopher Hitchens
#11. No, mes amis, impressionism is not charlatanry, nor a formula, nor a school. I should say rather it is the bold resolve to throw all those things overboard.
Joaquin Sorolla
#12. Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'
Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
Kingsley Amis
#13. The primal sin of those like myself, mes amis, is that because we were once people who acted like beasts, we are forever cursed to be beasts who know they were once men. ("In The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise")
Gemma Files
#14. I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.
Terry Eagleton
#15. The first book I bought with my own money as a teenager was Martin Amis's 'Money.' You know that thing when you read a book and you think, 'I'm going to have to read every word ever written by this man.'
John Niven
#16. Well, my father [Kingsley Amis] was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it was good that I began when I was young and bold and foolish, otherwise I'd have become too self-conscious and aware of the weight of not having written anything yet.
Martin Amis
#17. Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.
Martin Amis
#19. Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis
It was a dream I had last week
And some kind of record seemed vital.
I knew it wouldn't be much of a poem
But I love the title.
Wendy Cope
#20. Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
Russell Baker
#21. A blue-stocking is the scourge of her husband, children, friends, servants, and every one.
[Fr., Une femme bel-esprit est le fleau de son mari, de ses enfants, de ses amis, de ses valets, et tout le monde.]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#22. Les amis de l'abc... a group which barely missed becoming historic
Victor Hugo
#23. In the concordance of Nicola Six's kisses there were many subheads and subsections, many genres and phyla - chapter and verse, cross-references, multiple citations.
Martin Amis
#24. Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.
Martin Amis
#25. I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.
Kingsley Amis
#26. I wouldn't have minded a rather more detailed conclusion (to Pride and Prejudice) - say, a twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr. Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well.
Martin Amis
#27. Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.
Martin Amis
#28. Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time.
Martin Amis
#29. ... 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
#30. Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.
Martin Amis
#31. The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.
Martin Amis
#32. I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.
Martin Amis
#33. Yeah,' I said and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.
Martin Amis
#34. The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.
Martin Amis
#35. There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn. - SAMUEL JOHNSON
Kingsley Amis
#36. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever.
Martin Amis
#37. 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
#38. I want to convey a mood, and what you are reading is a constituent of how you feel. In biographies they should always tell us that, routinely, in the margin: what they were reading. What
Martin Amis
#39. I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not.
Kingsley Amis
#40. The prayer that is heard is not of many words ... but of Oneness
Vivian Amis
#41. It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.
Kingsley Amis
#42. Life gives you what you create ... not what you deserve.
Vivian Amis
#44. In the solitude of my cell I have come to the bitter realisation that I have sinned gravely against humanity.
Martin Amis
#45. The trouble with the hypochondriac is that he will be wrong about his condition nine hundred and ninety-nine times.
Kingsley Amis
#46. 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
#47. Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
Martin Amis
#48. Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.
Kingsley Amis
#49. 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
#50. When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
Kingsley Amis
#51. 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
#52. Her body is probably naked by now but there is nothing as naked as human eyes: they haven't even got skin over them.
Martin Amis
#53. Impartially, shrewdly, I considered suicide, though not in my worst moments. The bottle of pills. The note: 'No hard feelings, everyone, but I've thought about it and it's just not on, is it? It's nearly on, but not quite. No? Anyway, all the best, C.
Martin Amis
#54. Growing up in Oklahoma the way I did, and being raised the way I was raised by my parents, gave me such a strong foundation to go out into the world and fly, so to speak, the way I was able to do.
Suzy Amis
#55. Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief.
Martin Amis
#56. No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.
Kingsley Amis
#57. Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap.
Kingsley Amis
#58. By 12.30, Giles had consumed five gin-rickies, four gin-and-tonics, three gin-and-its, two gin-and-bitters, and one gin.
Martin Amis
#59. These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.
Martin Amis
#60. 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
#61. It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.
Kingsley Amis
#62. One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.
Martin Amis
#63. This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.
Martin Amis
#64. Suicide is a mind-body problem that ends violently and without any winner. I
Martin Amis
#65. When we home schooled my oldest, Jasper, in eighth grade, I saw how empowering it is for a child to learn in their own way. That rebooted my thinking about education.
Suzy Amis
#66. Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European ...
Kingsley Amis
#67. A Miracle is nothing more, than the removal of an Illusion.
Vivian Amis
#68. There is a realm in which miracles are possible and do take place. The door to this realm is the belief in all possibilities and YOU are the key.
Vivian Amis
#69. Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.
Martin Amis
#70. Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
Kingsley Amis
#71. Doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?
Martin Amis
#72. The Scandinavians are dear people but they've never been what you might call bywords for wit and sparkle, have they?
Kingsley Amis
#73. To think is to have doubt ... yet even thinking will bring you to "no thought" ... eventually.
Vivian Amis
#74. It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
Kingsley Amis
#75. It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
Martin Amis
#76. 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
#77. I think I'm losing my bottle. I think I'm going tonto.
Martin Amis
#78. There in the night their bed had the towelly smell of marriage.
Martin Amis
#81. A blonde girl wearing a man's shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy.
Kingsley Amis
#82. In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.
Martin Amis
#83. Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.
Martin Amis
#84. Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.
Kingsley Amis
#85. What was Richard? He was a revenger, in what was probably intended to be a comedy.
Martin Amis
#86. There is nothing we could add to that which has already been created ... perfection.
Vivian Amis
#87. And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.
Martin Amis
#88. The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.
Martin Amis
#89. The true path to success is to find your joy and share it with others.
Vivian Amis
#90. Smiles are Free, so given them away as often as you can!
Lily Amis
#91. 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
#92. Although he liked nearly everything else about himself, Keith hated his redeeming features. In his view they constituted his only major shortcoming -his one tragic flaw.
Martin Amis
#93. [On STDs] This be Nature's way of recommending monogamy.
Martin Amis
#94. Making lots of money
it's not that hard, you know. It's overestimated. Making lots of money is a breeze. You watch. ch. 1, p. 23 in Penguin paperback
Martin Amis
#95. The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
Martin Amis
#96. The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.
Martin Amis
#97. You shun your spirit,' he murmured, 'every time you agree to sell your days to the city, to measure out your life at the city's pace.
Martin Amis
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. I'll pour you the first one and after that, if you don't have one, it's your own f****** fault. You know where it is.
Kingsley Amis
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