Martin Amis Quotes

You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks. ~ Martin Amis

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

After many ponderous experiments the first crematorium was opened in December 1920 in Petrograd. It could manage barely 120 bodies a month, and, in February 1921, cremated itself when the wooden roof caught fire. ~ Martin Amis

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

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties. ~ Martin Amis

Being photographed was dead time for the soul. Can the head think, while it does the same half smile under the same light frown? If this was all true, then Richard's soul was in great shape. No one photographed him any more, not even his wife. When the photographs came back from an increasingly infrequent holiday. Richard was never there..an elbow or earlobe on the edge of the frame, on the edge of life and love.. ~ Martin Amis

You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal ~ Martin Amis

To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year. ~ Martin Amis

Has it ever happened to you ... ? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you're going to remember that moment for the rest of your life. ~ Martin Amis

He turns the pages from right to left. He begins at the beginning and ends at the end. This makes a quirky sense to me - but Mikio and I are definitely in the minority here. And how can we two be right? It would make so many others wrong. Water moves upward. It seeks the highest level. What did you expect? Smoke falls. Things are created in the violence of fire. But that's all right. Gravity still pins us to the planet. ~ Martin Amis

[On STDs] This be Nature's way of recommending monogamy. ~ Martin Amis

Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline. ~ Martin Amis

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.' ~ Martin Amis

When you're in love and trying to make someone love you back, you can hear the texture of your own footfalls, the whistling passage of your breath. Invisible eyes monitor you constantly: even at night something presides over the shape of your sleep. Every thought carries a tick or a cross. ~ Martin Amis

Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time. ~ Martin Amis

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be. ~ Martin Amis

What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves. ~ Martin Amis

What you had to have is usually tabulated as follows: luck; the ability to adapt, immediately and radically; a talent for inconspicuousness; solidarity with another individual or with a group; the preservation of decency ("the people who had no tenets to live by - of whatever nature - generally succumbed" no matter how ruthlessly they struggled); the constantly nurtured conviction of innocence (an essential repeatedly emphasised by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago); immunity to despair; and, again, luck. ~ Martin Amis

But first the past. Lily and Keith broke up because Lily wanted to act like a boy. That was the heart of the matter, really: girls acting like boys was in the air, and Lily wanted to try it out. So they had their first big row (its theme, ridiculously, was religion), and Lily announced *a trial separation*. The words came at him like a jolt of compressed air: such trials, he knew, were almost always a complete success. After two days of earnest misery, in his terrible room in the terrible flat in Earls Court, after two days of *desolation*, he phoned her and they met up, and tears were shed--on both side of the café table. She told him to be evolved about it. ~ Martin Amis

The militant Utopian, the perfectibilizer, from the outset, is in a malevolent rage at the obvious fact of human imperfectibility. ~ Martin Amis

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

Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death.
And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see. ~ Martin Amis

As regards structure, comedy has come a long way since Shakespeare, who in his festive conclusions could pair off any old shit and any old fudge-brained slag (see Claudio and Hero in Much Ado) and get away with it. But the final kiss no longer symbolizes anything and well-oiled nuptials have ceased to be a plausible image of desire. That kiss is now the beginning of the comic action, not the end that promises another beginning from which the audience is prepared to exclude itself. All right? We have got into the habit of going further and further beyond the happy-ever-more promise: relationships in decay, aftermaths, but with everyone being told a thing or two about themselves, busy learning from their mistakes. So, in the following phase, with the obstructive elements out of the way (DeForest, Gloria) and the consummation in sight, the comic action would have been due to end, happily. But who is going to believe that any more? ~ Martin Amis

The mock-heroic, in whatever guise. One example, from Alexander Theroux: 'It was high tea: the perfervid ritual in England which daily sweetens the ambiance of the discriminately invited and that nothing short of barratry, a provoked shaft of lightning, the King's enemies, or an act of God could ever hope to bring to an end.' This elaborate banality might serve as a lesson to all fifth-formers. The sentence is a wreck: ugly, untrue and illiterate; even in the interests of pseudo-elegant variation, you cannot start a clause with a which and then switch to a that. ~ Martin Amis

Literature is the great garden that is always there and is open to everyone 24 hours a day. Who tends it? The old tour guides and sylviculturists, the wardens, the fuming parkies in their sweat-soaked serge: these have died off. If you do see an official, a professional, these days, then he's likely to be a scowl in a labcoat, come to flatten a forest or decapitate a peak. The public wanders, with its oohs and ahs, its groans and jeers, its million opinions. The wanderers feed the animals, they walk on the grass, they step in the flowerbeds. But the garden never suffers. It is, of course, Eden; it is unfallen and needs no care. ~ Martin Amis

They say that it is one of the most terrifying manifestations in nature: a bull elephant in a state of must. Twin streams of vile-smelling liquid flow from the ducts of the temples and into the corners of the jaws. At these times the great beast will gore giraffes and hippos, will break the backs of cringeing rhinoceri. This was male-elephantine heat. Must: it derived via Urdu from the Persian mast or maest - "intoxicated." But I had settled for the modal verb. I must, I must, I just must. ~ Martin Amis

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived. ~ Martin Amis

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move( ... ) ~ Martin Amis

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

One evening, at the time of the Six-Day War, I [Christopher Hitchens] had my wicked way with a lovely lady, who had earlier intimated that she did not perhaps find me entirely repulsive. We procured a decent room, as I remember, at the Cadogan Hotel. Perhaps a little flown with wine, I asked her to don a Martin Amis face mask which I had - with a combination of sticky tape, elastic bands, cardboard, and a much-treasured photograph - prepared earlier. The fair damsel was happy to oblige, and thus attired she permitted me to embark on the hugely agreeable pathway to libidinous fulfillment. ~ Craig Brown

Films are all luck and anarchy. ~ Martin Amis

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

Every day, the dispensing of existence ... Its face is fierce and distant and ancient. ~ Martin Amis

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

Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are. ~ Martin Amis

He had promised my payout would be halfway to six figures. And it was. It was three figures. ~ Martin Amis

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

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough. ~ Martin Amis

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

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

Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. ~ Martin Amis

When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you're writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It's sacred and it's secret, even to the writer. ~ Martin Amis

On page 605, Blumenthal says that 'I made friends with Hitchens's friends the novelists Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.' True in its way. I particularly remember the occasion when he called me up and invited me to dinner with Dick Morris, but only on condition that I brought Rushdie (who was staying in my house) along with me. No Rushdie: no invitation. So I never did get to meet Dick Morris. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged ... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually. ~ Martin Amis

Patent attorney Greg Raymer is no drink of water, but there is a woman in his autograph queue ("My husband's a great fan. You've inspired him, big-time") who has munched herself into a wheelchair: arms like legs, legs like torsos, and a torso like an exhausted orgy. ~ Martin Amis

Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn't show you your reflection. It showed you your soul - it showed you who you really were.
The wizard couldn't look at it without turning away. The king couldn't look at it. The courtiers couldn't look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could. ~ Martin Amis

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

In LA, you can't do anything unless you drive. Now I can't do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn't possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it's an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there's a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.
So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God's green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF-BOOZE – NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON'T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don't walk. Stay inside. Don't walk. Drive. Don't walk. Run! ~ Martin Amis

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice. ~ Martin Amis

All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction. ~ Martin Amis

Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture. ~ Martin Amis

My clothes are made of monosodium glutamate and hexachlorophene. My food is made of polyester, rayon and lurex. My rug lotions contain vitamins. Do my vitamins feature cleaning agents? I hope so. My brain is gimmicked by a microprocessor the size of a quark, and costing ten pee and running the whole deal. I am made of - junk, I'm just junk. ~ Martin Amis

It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, as it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay. ~ Martin Amis

There is a Western phenomenon called the male midlife crisis. Very often it is heralded by divorce. What history might have done to you, you bring about on purpose: separation from woman and child. Don't tell me that such men aren't tasting the ancient flavors of death and defeat.
In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary. He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.
Over here, now, there's no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death. ~ Martin Amis

How do you think the world popped into existence? - I'd say wee we are at least five Albert Einsteins away from answering this question. ~ Martin Amis

The world is boiling. You hardly dare open a paper these days: the news is all of cataclysm and collapse. Tempers are threadbare; the yobs are winning; everybody accepts the fact that they've got to get nastier in order to survive. The world is going bad on us. I'm having nothing to do with it. ~ Martin Amis

This is a true story but I can't believe it's really happening. It's a murder story, too. I can't believe my luck. And a love story (I think), of all strange things, so late in the century, so late in the goddamned day. ~ Martin Amis

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

I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow. ~ Martin Amis

In freedom, every non-nomenklatura citizen knew perpetual hunger – the involuntary slurp and gulp of the esophagus. In camp, your hunger kicked as I imagine a fetus would kick. It was the same with boredom. And boredom, by now, has lost all its associations with mere lassitude and vapidity. Boredom is no longer the absence of emotion; it is itself an emotion, and a violent one. A silent tantrum of boredom. ~ Martin Amis

I find it's more fun to write about something that you don't know completely and that you will discover on route. A dear friend of mine ... once said: 'The only time I know anything is when it comes to me at the point of my pen.' So I think that if you start to write about things that you know half well, that you're fascinated by, that you sense you have an appreciation of that others might not have, but you do have to acquire the knowledge as you go, you discover a great many things at the point of a pen. And it keeps the writing alive in itself in a way.
(in an interview with Martin Amis, 1991, see YouTube) ~ Norman Mailer

It's tremendously important how you get on with the other sex. Your life record on that is incredibly important. You never really think about any of your other achievements. ~ Martin Amis

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say. ~ Martin Amis

Suicide is a mind-body problem that ends violently and without any winner. I ~ Martin Amis

Suffering doesn't concern itself with the scale of other sufferings. ~ Martin Amis

The refusal of laughter to absent itself, in the Soviet case, has already been noted (and will be returned to). It seems that the Twenty Million will never command the sepulchral decorum of the Holocaust. This is not, or not only, a symptom of the general 'asymmetry of indulgence' (the phrase is Ferdinand Mount's). It would not be so unless something in the nature of Bolshevism permitted it to be so. ~ Martin Amis

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

The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists
haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations. ~ Martin Amis

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

On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational
to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of. ~ Martin Amis

Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say? ~ Martin Amis

Points of a journey do not matter when the journey has no destination, only an end. ~ Martin Amis

The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else. ~ Martin Amis

Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers. ~ Martin Amis

Des heard the dogs. They weren't barking, he realized, not exactly. They were swearing. And the rooftop rottweilers, faintly and almost plaintively, at this distance, were swearing back:
'FUCKOFF!' yelled Joe, or Jeff. It was almost a monosyllable.
'FUCKOFF!' 'FUCK! FUCK!' 'FUCKOFF!' 'FUCKOFF!' yelled Jeff, or Joe. 'FUCKOFF!' 'FUCK! FUCK!' 'FUCKOFF! ~ Martin Amis

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. ~ Martin Amis

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

I was informed by my viscera that now was the time to put my arm around her shoulders. I ignored them. ~ Martin Amis

Beware of clichés. Not just the clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought - even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation. ~ Geoff Dyer

If you feel you have a strong constituency among the young, you can really die happy, because the great unanswered question, the only valid value judgment is whether you're going to last, and that tells you that you are, for a bit at least. ~ Martin Amis

The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves. ~ Martin Amis

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

So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else. ~ Martin Amis

On his way back through the plane Richard had seen women crying-- three women, four women. And he realized that there always were these women on planes, crying, with makeup in meltdown, folded over in the window seat or candidly hideous in the aisle, clutching Kleenex. Before, if he assumed anything, he assumed they were crying about boyfriends or husbands (partings or sunderings), or crying (who cared?) from toothache or curse pains or fear of flying. But now he was forty, and he knew.

Women on planes were crying because someone they love or loved is dead or dying. Every plane has them. ~ Martin Amis

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. ~ Martin Amis

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

Nuclear weapons could bring about the Book of Revelation in a matter of hours; they could do it today. Of course, no dead will rise; nothing will be revealed (nothing meaning two things, the absence of everything and a thing called nothing). Events that we call "acts of God"
floods, earthquakes, eruptions
are flesh wounds compared to the human act of nuclear war: a million Hiroshimas. Like God, nuclear weapons are free creations of the human mind. Unlike God, nuclear weapons are real. And they are here. ~ Martin Amis

It's a common slander of the Jews, but it's no slander of a huge fraction of the Germans. They went like sheep to the slaughterhouse. And then they donned the rubber aprons and set to work. ~ Martin Amis

All rooms are waiting
rooms. Your room is a waiting room. You are waiting, I am
waiting. Everything is getting nearer to being over. ~ Martin Amis

When you become old ... When you become old, you find yourself auditioning for the role of a lifetime; then, after interminable rehearsals, you're finally starring in a horror film--a talentless, irresponsible, and above all low-budget horror film, in which (as is the way with horror films) they're saving the worst for last. ~ Martin Amis

I'm sitting in the prow-shaped dining room of a tourist steamer, the Georgi Zhukov, on the Yenisei River, which flows from the foothills of Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, thus cleaving the northern Eurasian plain – a distance of some two and a half thousand versts. Given Russian distances, and the general arduousness of Russian life, you'd expect a verst to be the equivalent of – I don't know – thirty-nine miles. In fact it's barely more than a kilometer. ~ Martin Amis

The criminal resembles the artist in his pretension, his incompetence, and his self-pity. ~ Martin Amis

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life. ~ Martin Amis

Suicide is what everyone young thinks they'll do before they get old. But they hardly ever get round to it. They just don't want to commit themselves in that way. When you're young and you look ahead, time ends in mist at twenty-five. 'Old won't happen to me', you say. But old does. Oh, old does. Old always gets you in the end. ~ Martin Amis

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist's couch or even the lovers' bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall. ~ Martin Amis

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

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

The night was electric - The night was in italics. ~ Martin Amis

It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can't respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubation period.

Source: http://www.euronews.com/2013/06/25/ma... ~ Martin Amis