Martin Amis Quotes & Sayings

Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, 'Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.' — Martin Amis

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

Q: What's the difference between a Communist car and a Communist proselytizer? A: You can close the door on a Communist proselytizer. — 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

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

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

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

In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong. — Martin Amis

Nazism did not destroy civil society. Bolshevism did destroy civil society. This is one of the reasons for the "miracle" of German recovery, and for the continuation of Russian vulnerability and failure. Stalin did not destroy civil society. Lenin destroyed civil society. — Martin Amis

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

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

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

When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air. — 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

He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction. — Martin Amis

... 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

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

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

The English feel schadenfreude even about themselves. — Martin Amis

Now they were all moving to no effect-just moving, just switching things off and switching things on, just picking things up and putting things down and picking things up and stroking the cat and counting the mugs and fighting for air. It seemed that everything they did had already been done and done, and that everything they thought had already been thought and thought, and that this would never end. Excuse me said panic to each of them in turn. They had no mouth and they had to scream. — 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

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

Blood and bodies and death and power. — 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

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

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

Stalin's mental journey, by 1943, proceeded in the opposite direction to that of Hitler. One moved toward reality; the other moved away from it. They crossed paths at Stalingrad. And as the war turned on the hinge of that battle (and on the new psychological opposition), Stalin might have concerned himself with a "counterfactual": if, instead of decapitating his army, he had intelligently prepared it for war, Russia might have defeated Germany in a matter of weeks. Such a course of action, while no doubt entailing grave consequences of its own, would have saved about 40 million lives, including the vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust. — Martin Amis

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw - that of outright unreadability. — Martin Amis

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer. — Martin Amis

Love finds me difficult. — Martin Amis

Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God. — Martin Amis

Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism. — Martin Amis

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

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

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

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions. — Martin Amis

The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light. — Martin Amis

Let me give you a lesson on war, Golo. Rule number one: never invade Russia. — Martin Amis

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

I love the working class, and everyone from it that I've met, and think they're incredible witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there. A lot of rough stuff as well. What there is, too, is an awful lot of expressiveness and intelligence and originality down there. And a lot of thwarted intelligence. — Martin Amis

I gestured at my litre of fizzy red wine. "Want a drop of this?" I asked him.
No thanks. I try not to drink at lunchtime."
So do I. But I never quite make it."
I feel like shit all day if I drink at lunchtime."
Me too. But I feel like shit all lunchtime if I don't."
Yes, well it all comes down to choices, doesn't it?" he said. "It's the same in the evenings. Do you want to feel good at night or do you want to feel good in the morning? It's the same with life. Do you want to feel good young or do you want to feel good old? One or the other, not both."
Isn't it a tragedy? — Martin Amis

Whether they soothe or snarl, cringe or strut, suicide notes do not seek to entertain. I — Martin Amis

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

Erections, as we all know, come to the teenager on a plate. — Martin Amis

He frowned. She laughed. He brightened. She pouted. He grinned. She flinched. Come on: we don't do that. Except when we're pretending. Only babies frown and flinch. The rest of us just fake with our fake faces.
He grinned. No He didn't. If a guy grins at you for real these days, you'd better chop his head off before he chops off yours. Soon the sneeze and the yawn will be mostly for show. Even the twitch.
She laughed. No she didn't. We laugh about twice a year. Most of us have lost our laughs and now make do with false ones.
He smiled.
Not quite true.
All that no good to think, no good to say, no good to write. All that no good to write. — Martin Amis

September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East. — Martin Amis

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

Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite. — Martin Amis

This is the way that it goes. In your mid forties you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later you have your first crisis of age (my body whispers that death is already intrigued by me). But something very interesting happens to you in between.
As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get that sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you sometimes say to yourself; That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick. In certain moods you may want to put it a bit more forcefully. As in: OY!! That went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!! ... Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past. — Martin Amis

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands. — Martin Amis

I have to say that the situation didn't look very promising. There was a woman in the bed right enough. But there was a man there too. Fully clothed, enormous in midnight-blue serge suit and peaked cap, he knelt above her rhythmically slapping her face with a pendulum action of his heavy-gloved hand. No, this didn't look like our kind of thing at all. Warily John slipped out of his socks and shirt. You have to give him credit: he keeps his cool and works the percentages. Now the two mean moved strangely past each other; and with some diffidence John climbed into bed. The other guy stared at us, with raised, with churning face. Then he did some shouting and strode out of there - though he paused, and thoughtfully dimmed the lights, as he left the room. We heard his boots on the stairs. The lady clutched me.

"My husband!" she explained. — Martin Amis

In the solitude of my cell I have come to the bitter realisation that I have sinned gravely against humanity. — Martin Amis

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun. — Martin Amis

All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.' — Martin Amis

Left alone in an interrogation room, some men will look as though they're well into their last ten seconds before throwing up. And they'll look that way for hours. They sweat like they just climbed out of the swimming pool. They eat and swallow air. I mean these guys are really going through it. You come and tip a light in their face. And they're bugeyed - the orbs both big and red, and faceted also. Little raised soft-cornered squares, wired with rust.
These are the innocent. — Martin Amis

It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language. — Martin Amis

It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think that's true - unless it isn't true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward - shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It's a mess in there. — Martin Amis

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author. — Martin Amis

Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find. — Martin Amis

Robert Conquest once suggested that 'a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler. — Martin Amis

With the flat smile of the deeply inconvenienced. — Martin Amis

Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic - you want all those inequalities, because that's what makes life interesting. — Martin Amis

You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star. — Martin Amis

Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road. — Martin Amis

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

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

If what we're doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad? On the ramp at night, why do we feel the ungainsayable need to get so brutishly drunk? Why did we make the meadow churn and spit? The flies as fat as blackberries, the vermin, the diseases, ach, scheusslich, schmierig - why? Why do rats fetch 5 bread rations per cob? Why did the lunatics, and only the lunatics, seem to like it here? Why, here, do conception and gestation promise not new life but certain death for both woman and child? Ach, why all der Dreck, der Sumpf, der Schleim? Why do we turn the snow brown? Why do we do that? Make the snow look like the shit of angels. Why do we do that? — Martin Amis

Often it doesn't occur to you what kind of novel you're writing until quite late on. — Martin Amis

The fact was that facts were losing their value. Stalin had broken the opposition. He was also far advanced toward his much stranger objective of breaking the truth. Or it may have been the other way about: actuality, under Stalin, was such that dread and disgust forbade you to accept it - or even to contemplate it. — Martin Amis

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside ... — Martin Amis

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there.
Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way. — Martin Amis

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

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being. — Martin Amis

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

When you considered this world
people winched up and lowered down into the earth in steel cages and speed-fed through the tunnels, with doors cracking everywhere, and arctic winds mingling with dusty gaps of fire from the planet's core
it was hard to believe how delicate life was, how breakable things were. — Martin Amis

Let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything. — Martin Amis

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel. — Martin Amis

People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts. — Martin Amis

More will mean worse. — Martin Amis

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

I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right. — Martin Amis

Richard didn't mind Gwyn being rich ... Having always been poor was good preparation for being rich. Better than having always been rich ... The well and all its sweet water would surely one day run dry. — Martin Amis

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

Oh man sometimes I wake up feel like a cat runover.
Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it's heavy. Oh it's hard. It isn't easy. Jesus, I never meant me any harm. All I wanted was a good time. — Martin Amis

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

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

You can't sort of write the novel as if you're taking dictation from heaven. — Martin Amis

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. — Martin Amis

It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle. — Martin Amis

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

There's a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer's views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street. — Martin Amis

One recalls John Updike's argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so. — 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

Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money. — 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

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

Like most people, I feel ambiguous guilt for my inferiors, ambiguous envy for my superiors, and mandatory low-spirits about the system itself. — Martin Amis

Yet no one seemed to have thought through the implications of a world in which everyone cheated. The other morning Keith had bought five hundred vanity sachets of Outrage, his staple perfume. At lunchtime he discovered that they all contained water, a substance not much less expensive than Outrage, but harder to sell. Keith was relieved that he had already unloaded half the consignment on Damian Noble in the Portobello Road. Then he held Damian's tenners up to the light: they were crude forgeries. He passed on the notes without much trouble, in return for twenty-four bottles of vodka which, it turned out, contained a misty, faintly scented liquid. Outrage! — Martin Amis