Martin Amis Quotes

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

Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I'm too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.

— Martin Amis

“What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired. More than that, they both lived their lives 'beautifully'
not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been a prerequisite), but in the droll fortitude of their perseverance. They got the work done, with style.”

— Martin Amis

“Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do
like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.”

— Martin Amis

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

“My theory is - we don't really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and quickly as if anybody's there.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

“Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time.”

— Martin Amis

“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

“But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.”

— 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

“Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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 ad world used to be something of a refuge for literary types. But I feared for myself at J.W.T. It seemed to be entirely peopled by blocked dramatists, likeably shambling poets, and one-off novelists. The whole place felt like a clubworld sunset home for literary talent.”

— Martin Amis

And while Trish stared - stared, as it now seemed, into her own eyes - Guy held her hand and watched the crowd: how it bled colour from the enormous room and drew all energy towards itself, forming one triumphal being; how it trembled, then burst or came or died, releasing individuality; and how the champion was borne along on its subsidence, his back slapped, his hair tousled, mimed by female hands and laughing, like the god of mobs.

— Martin Amis

“Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time's arrow moves the other way.”

— 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

“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

“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

“In the solitude of my cell I have come to the bitter realisation that I have sinned gravely against humanity.”

— Martin Amis

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

“Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last, you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.”

— Martin Amis

Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.

— 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

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

— Martin Amis

“Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.”

— 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

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

— Martin Amis

“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

“When you've lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.”

— Martin Amis

“I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.”

— 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

“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

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

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

— Martin Amis

“When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.”

— 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

“Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.”

— Martin Amis

“Amis is acutely, vibrantly sensitive to the different registers of laughter. He knows that it can be the most affirming and uniquely human sound, and also the most sinister and animalistic one. He understands every note of every octave that separates the liberating shout of mirth from the cackle of a bully or the snigger of a sadist.”

— Martin Amis

“I don't think I'd like Manhattan anymore. My mother-in-law lives there, and you go there. But I like looking at it from a distance. It's a fantastic sight - every time, it awes me.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

“Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May,

— Martin Amis

“I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.”

— 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