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Martin Amis

138 quotes

“I think money is the central deformity in life, as Saul Bellow says, it's one of the evils that has cheerfully survived identification as an evil. 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 we have all agreed to go along with. My hatred for it does look as though I'm underwriting a certain asceticism, but it isn't really that way: I don't offer alternatives to what I deplore.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Novelists in Interview (1985) edited by John Haffenden
“Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Novelists in Interview (1985) edited by John Haffenden
“Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Observer [London] (30 August 1987)
“Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: First Lady on Trial" The Sunday Times [London] (17 March 1996) (Online text in PDF format)
“It's been said that happiness writes white. It doesn't show up on the page. When you're on holiday and writing a letter home to a friend, no one wants a letter that says the food is good and the weather is charming and the accommodations comfortable. You want to hear about lost passports and rat-filled shacks.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Sadistic Muse" - an interview with Laura Miller at salon.com (10 February 1998)
“When you review an exhibition of paintings you don't compose a painting about it, when you review a film you don't make a film about it and when you review a new CD you don't make a little CD about it. But when you review a prose-narrative then you write a prose-narrative about that prose-narrative and those who write the secondary prose-narrative, let's face it, must have once had dreams of writing the primary prose-narrative. And so there is a kind of hierarchy of envy and all those other things.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Ramona Koval on Radio National (4 September 1999)
“What happened on September 11? On September 11 — what happened? Picture this: two upended matchboxes, knocked over by the sheer force of paper-darts. Only it was much, much worse than that. In fact, words alone cannot adduce how much worse it was than that. September 11 was an attack on words: we felt a general deficit. And with words destroyed, we had to make do, we had to bolster truth with colons and repetition: not only repetition: but repetition and: colons. This is what we adduce.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World: An Explanation" in The Daily Telegraph (8 March 2003)
“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 (1949–2023) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Robert Birnbaum (8 December 2003)
“[I am] secular to the bones, but not an atheist.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Philip Ottermann, "Beyond belief," The Guardian (5 July 2008)
“I think I'm losing my bottle. I think I'm going tonto.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bear to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there’s nothing for you here.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I try to like the way the world is changing, but there seems to be no extra room for me inside.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My calculations about how to stay alive and sane on this particular planet have clearly been at fault. Lots of people are plenty uglier and poorer than me without seeming to mind, without the self-hate and self-pity – the sentimentality, in a word – that makes me such a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The night was electric — the night was in italics.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We kept nearly bumping into each other, unavoidably. I wished we could stop avoiding each other long enough to agree to avoid each other properly.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The past weaves round all this; we still duck in and out of its lost but shimmering kingdoms.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Claus von Bülow" (1983)
“What is this televisual mastery of Reagan's? It is a celebration of good intentions and unexceptional abilities. His style is one of hammy self-effacement, a wry dismay at his own limited talents and their drastic elevation.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ronald Reagan" (1979)
“In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gore Vidal" (1977)
“Our vulgar delight in American vulgarity.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New Evangelists" (1980)
“When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kurt Vonnegut" (1983)
“Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Joan Didion" (1980)
“The doltish euphemism of conglomerate America.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hugh Hefner" (1985)
“Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares — loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hugh Hefner" (1985)
“In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes — homosexuality, sexual disease, and death — about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Making Sense of AIDS" (1985)
“Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 to use 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 (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Einstein's Monsters," by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bujak spoke of Einstein as if he were God's literary critic, God being a poet. I, more stolidly, tend to suspect that God is a novelist — a garrulous and deeply unwholesome one too.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Character is destiny.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Donald Trump Is Sorry" (20 July 2020), The American Conservative
Also quoted by: Rod Dreher
“And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it was Montherlant who said that happiness writes white: it doesn't show up on the page.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What saddened and incensed her was the abdication of power, so craven, the surrender so close to home. And power was what she was in for. Nicola had lived deliciously, but she was promiscuous on principle, as a sign of emancipation, of spiritual freedom, freedom from men. She was, she believed, without appetite, and prided herself on her passionless brilliance in bed. But then the subtle rearrangement, and the abject whisper... and it poisoned everything, somehow.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sitting there beside the bookcase, trying to read, in a growing panic of self-consciousness. Why? Because reading presupposed a future.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man, teetering on the roadside; it makes you seek him out with eyes of love.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought-experiment. At the camp fire 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 (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of all the forces, love is the strangest. ... Love can make a woman pick up a bus, or it can crush a man under the weight of a feather. Or it just lets everything go on as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. That's the kind of force love is.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The driver treated his cab as a peasant might treat his horse or ass, with numb and proprietorial cruelty. The bursts of acceleration were like long-toothed, lip-flapping exhalations; then came the looping whinny of the brakes.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Phantom of the Opera: The Republicans in 1988" (1988)
“Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Phantom of the Opera: The Republicans in 1988" (1988)