Amis Quotes & Sayings

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

Every moment is brand new, but we often fill the new with fear of the future or pain of the past instead of simply enjoying the present. — Vivian Amis

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn. — Martin Amis

Energy is the belief in a separation and that which creates and keeps the illusion alive. — Vivian Amis

One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction. I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled. — Martin Amis

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

Make time for productivity and creativity instead of useless socialmedia activity! — Lily Amis

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

Are snoopers snooping on their own pain? Probably. — Martin Amis

Man who treat Woman without respect
and see Woman ONLY as a public toilett
forget where they spend their first 9
months of their Life! — Lily Amis

{Rogers} sexual aim is "to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature who is the opposite of these: to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal. — Kingsley Amis

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was. — Martin Amis

If you want to know the real meaning of pornography, it is the utter dissociation of love and sex, the banishment of love from the sexual arena. — Martin Amis

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

Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go. — Kingsley Amis

Give people time and space. Dont beg for anyone to stay. Dont beg anyone for Love. Whats meant for you will always be yours. If you are meant to be together you will be despite everything! Trust in Gods plans. — Lily Amis

I sometimes feel that more lousy dishes are presented under the banner of pate than any other. — Kingsley Amis

To discuss a Martin Amis book, you must first discuss the orchestrated release of a Martin Amis book. In London, which rightly prides itself on the vibrancy of its literary cottage industry, Amis is the Steve Jobs of book promoters, and his product rollouts are as carefully managed as anything Apple dreams up. — Graydon Carter

It's interesting when you're doing signing sessions with other writers and you look at the queues at each table and you can see definite human types gathering there ... My queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags and people who stare at me very intensely, as if I have some particular message for them. As if I must know that they've been reading me, that this dyad or symbiosis of reader and writer has been so intense that I must somehow know about it. — Martin Amis

All his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face. — Kingsley Amis

Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do. — Kingsley Amis

Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what's more you want to go on fitting it. — Kingsley Amis

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

Often it doesn't occur to you what kind of novel you're writing until quite late on. — 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 you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong. — Kingsley Amis

Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief. — 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

Les amis de l'abc... a group which barely missed becoming historic — Victor Hugo

In her final months [Princess] Diana was being shat upon by the tabloids
basically for sleeping with an Arab. When she died, these same papers were astonished by the millennial wave of emotionalism that swept the country ... [One paper] had a print-ready story about what a slag the Princess was, and they had to pull it at the last moment. It was replaced with an image of Diana as an angel, ascending to heaven. — Martin Amis

Esprit de l'escalier: spirit of the staircase, wishing you'd said, wishing you'd done. Yet how much more indelible it was when the staircase was the staircase that led to the bedroom. — Martin Amis

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

It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with. — Kingsley Amis

The American critic Dale Peck, author of Hatchet Jobs (2004), argues that reviewing finds its true character in critical GBH such as Fischer's [review of Martin Amis's Yellow Dog]. It represents a return to the prehistoric origins of reviewing in Zoilism - a kind of pelting of pretentious literature with dung, lest the writers get above themselves; it is to the novelist what the gown of humiliation was to the Roman politician - a salutary ordeal. Less grandly, bad reviews are fun, so long as you are not the author. There is, it must be admitted, a kind of furtive blood sport pleasure in seeing a novelist suffer. You read on. Whereas most of us stop reading at the first use of the word 'splendid' or 'marvellous' in a review. — John Sutherland

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

It's hard to make progress with grief. — 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 scored right away with me by being the smooth, fine-grained sort, not the coarse flaky, dry-on-the-outside rubbish full of chunds of gut and gristle to testify to its authenticity. — Kingsley Amis

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

Then, Patrick, you do feel it too? You do feel ... something? It would be so bleak if you felt nothing. That's what scares women, you know.'
'I do know, and you needn't be scared. I feel something all right.'
'Promise me you'll always treat me as a person.'
'I promise.'
'Promises are so easily given.'
'I'll fulfill this one. Let me show you.'
After a shaky start he was comfortably in the swing of it, having recognised he was on familiar ground after all. Experience had brought him to see that this kind of thing was nothing more than the levying of cock-tax, was reasonable and normal, in fact, even though some other parts of experience strongly suggested that what he had shelled out so far was only a down payment. — Kingsley Amis

Beneath the clock was an enormous arrow, on which was printed: Change Here For Eastern Trains. But time had no arrow, not here. — Martin Amis

Seated on a paving-stone near Enjolras, Courfeyrac continued to jeer at the cannon, and every passage of that sinister cloud of projectiles that is called grapeshot, accompanied by its monstrous din, drew from him an ironical comment.
'You're wearing yourself out, you poor old brute. You're getting hoarse. You're not thundering, only spluttering. It's breaking my heart.'
His remarks were greeted with laughter. — Victor Hugo

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

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

Take a look at the scaly witches round your local shopping center, many of them with children. Grim enough with their clothes on. Imagine them naked! Snatches that yo-yo between their knees, breasts so flaccid you could tie them in a knot. One would have to be literally galvanized on Spanish Fly even to consider it. Yet it gets done somehow. Look at the kids. - The teenager may be more spontaneous, doglike, etc., but it's generally only another name on the list, only another notch on the cock. — Martin Amis

Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses. — 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

No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children. — Kingsley Amis

In order to know the Truth, you have to be out of your mind. — Vivian Amis

Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in. — Kingsley Amis

I was never an Angry Young Man. I am angry only when I hit my thumb with a hammer. — Kingsley Amis

I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative party because it is the party of nonpolitics, of resistance to politics. I have seen how many of the evils of life - failure, loneliness, fear, boredom, inability to communicate - are ineradicable by political means, and that attempts so to eradicate them are disastrous. — Kingsley Amis

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

When communism failed, it wasn't a good idea that had gone wrong, it was a bad idea that had been sustained with incredible determination in the face of all the commonsense arguments, and at the cost of 20 million lives at least, in Russia, to build the socialist Utopia. — Martin Amis

Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food. — Kingsley 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

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

The mind is neither good nor bad, it is the oneness with mind that creates suffering. — Vivian Amis

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

In general, writers never find out how strong their talent is: that investigation begins with their obituaries. In the USSR, writers found out how good they were when they were still alive. If the talent was strong, only luck or silence could save them. — Martin Amis

Life Is Fair I am sure you have heard the question "Why do bad things happen to good people?", but bad things happen to both good people and bad people equally. Good things happen to happy people. — Vivian 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

The prayer that is heard is not of many words ... but of Oneness — Vivian Amis

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

We seek love in relationships, peace in security, and joy in material things ... but these feelings are divine and not dependent on any outer circumstances. — Vivian Amis

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

For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound. — Martin Amis

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write. — 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 too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it. — Kingsley Amis

They claim there's a rationale for the children, don't they, sir?"
"Yes. Those babes in arms will grow up and want revenge on the Nazis in about 1963. I suppose the rationale for the women under forty-five is that they might be pregnant. And the rationale for the older women is while we're at it. — 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

For a moment he felt like devoting the next ten years to working his way to a position as art critic on purpose to review Bertrand's work unfavorably. — Kingsley Amis

When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower. — Martin Amis

In bereavement, make yourself better, not bitter. — Martin Amis

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

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for. — Martin Amis

Good things happen to happy people — Vivian Amis

I know quite a few eco designers who build dresses out of old couture gowns. They disassemble, 'upcycle,' and reuse them in extraordinary ways. To me, that's a sustainable way of doing things. — Suzy Amis

If you can see it, you can achieve it. God helps those who helps themselves. Power is in the act of humility. — Patricia Amis

He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic. — Kingsley 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

Never judge people based on their nationality, religion, race, gender, skin colour or look. Humans are all the same. They're God's loving children." Angel of Hope — Lily Amis

Oppression lays down blood-lust. It lays it down like a wine. — Martin Amis

Since Henry Miller's Tropic books, of course, it has become difficult to talk sensibly about girls' c*nts. — Martin Amis

Good things don't happen to "good people"; good things happen to happy people. — Vivian Amis

Amis is a force unto himself There is, quite simply, no one else like him. — Jonathan Yardley

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

We have found each other for a reason to fill each other's empty heart in every season! — Lily Amis

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question. — Kingsley 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

Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European ... — Kingsley Amis

The only writer who gives me unfeigned pleasure is P.G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bit heavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown over Sunset at Blandings. — Martin Amis

The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority ... the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty. — 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

My 12-year-old daughter said to me, "Enough with the subtitles, Daddy, for crying out loud." Because they always seem to cloud the issue rather than clarify it. — Martin Amis

[on daytime drinking] '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. — Martin Amis