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Martin Amis

138 quotes

“Not greatly gifted, not deeply beautiful, Madonna tells America that fame comes from wanting it badly enough. And everyone is terribly good at badly wanting things.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Madonna" (1992)
“Laughter always forgives.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and 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 (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Feminists have often claimed a moral equivalence for sexual and racial prejudice. There are certain affinities and one or two of these affinities are mildly and paradoxically encouraging. Sexism is like racism: we all feel such impulses. Our parents feel them more strongly than we feel them; our children, we trust, will feel them less strongly than we feel them. People don't change or improve much, but they do evolve. It is very slow.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Philip Larkin, a big, fat, bald librarian at the University of Hull, was unquestionably England's unofficial laureate: our best-loved poet since the war; better loved for our poet than John Betjeman, who was loved also for his charm, his famous beagle, his patrician Bohemianism and his televisual charisma, all of which Larkin notably lacked. Ten years later, Larkin is now something like a pariah, or an untouchable.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They can't ban or burn Larkin's books. What they can embark on is the more genteel process of literary demotion.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One wonders how the literary revisionists and canon cleansers can bear to take the money. Imagine a school of sixteenth century art criticism that spent its time contently jeering at the past for not knowing about perspective.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just as a Philistine does not on the whole devote his life to his art, so a misogynist does not devote his inner life to women. Larkin's men friends devolved into pen-pals. Such intimacies as he shared, he shared with women.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Andrew Motion's book, we have the constant sense that Larkin is somehow falling short of the cloudless emotional health enjoyed by, for instance, Andrew Motion. Also the sense, as Motion invokes his like-minded contemporaries, that Larkin is being judged by a newer, cleaner, braver, saner world. … Motion is extremely irritated by Larkin's extreme irritability. He's always complaining that Larkin is always complaining.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His last words were spoken to a woman, to the nurse who was holding his hand. Perhaps we all have the last words ready when we go into the last room. Perhaps the thing about last words is not how good they are, but whether we can get them out. What Larkin said faintly was, "I'm going to the inevitable.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A life is one kind of biography and the letters are another kind of life, but the internal story, the true story is in the Collected Poems. The recent attempts by Motion and others to pass judgement on Larkin look awfully green and pale, compared with the self-examinations of the poetry. They think they judge him? No, he judges them. His indivisibility judges their hedging and trimming. His honesty judges their watchfulness.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Larkin the man is separated from us historically by changes in the self. For his generation, you were what you were and that was that. It made you unswervable and adamantine. My father had this quality. I don't. None of us do. There are too many forces at work, there are too many fronts to cover. Still, a price has to be paid for not caring what others think of you, and Larkin paid it. He couldn't change the cards he was dealt. What poor hands we hold, when we face each other honestly. His poems insist on this helplessness...”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it's the whole impulse to judge and censor and euphemize, that is the enemy. … What fun, to feel superior to T. S. Eliot. And that's the impulse that I am suspicious of.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending ...”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All publicity isn't good publicity. As a New York publicist put it: "What: the guy's an asshole so I'll go and buy his novel?”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth's poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics — his attitude to the poor, say, or his unconscious 'valorization' of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the historical vulnerabilities of literature, as a subject for study, is that it has never seemed difficult enough. This may come as news to the buckled figure of the book reviewer, but it's true. Hence the various attempts to elevate it, complicate it, systematize it. Interacting with literature is easy.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Does screen violence provide a window or a mirror? Is it an effect or a cause, an encouragement, a facilitation? Fairly representatively, I think, I happen to like screen violence while steadily execrating its real-life counterpart. Moreover, I can tell the difference between the two. One is happening, one is not.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince, 'N', as he is called, uses quotation marks for such vulgarisms as 'sulks,' 'commuters' and 'worthwhile activities', as well as for phrases like 'too good to be true', 'the wrong end of the stick' and 'keep in touch.' The reader reflects that a cliché or approximation, wedged between two inverted commas, is still a cliché or approximation. Besides, you see how it would 'get on your nerves' if I were to 'go on' like this 'the whole time'...”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like all obsessions, Ballard's novel is occasionally boring and frequently ridiculous. The invariance of its intensity is not something the reviewer can easily suggest. Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain. You finish the book with some bafflement and irritation. But this is only half the experience. You then sit around waiting for the novel to come and haunt you. And it does.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not many people know this, but on top of writing regularly for every known newspaper and magazine, Anthony Burgess writes regularly for every unknown one, too. Pick up a Hungarian quarterly or a Portuguese tabloid - and there is Burgess, discoursing on goulash or test-driving the new Fiat 500. 'Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.' Even today, at seventy, and still producing book after book, Burgess spends half his time writing music. He additionally claims to do all the housework.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would be inaccurate to say that John Fowles is a middlebrow writer who sometimes hopes he is a highbrow: it has never occurred to him to believe otherwise. There is a difference, morally.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Vidal is determined to be a) in the thick of things, and b) above the fray. He knows everybody and he doesn't want to know anybody. He has had lovers by the thousand while doing 'nothing' — deliberately, at least — to please the other.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As elsewhere in his writing, Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of obvious appeal to the humourless is the writer who comes on stage in a clown outfit or King Kong suit, with party hat and harem slippers, with banana skins and custard pies... It remains a sound rule that funny journalism can only flourish as the offshoot or sideline of something larger. No funny journalist who is that and nothing more will ever write anything lastingly funny.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It occurs to you that Ulysses is about cliché. It is about inherited, ready-made formulations - most notably Irish Catholicism and anti-Semitism. After all, prejudices are clichés: they are secondhand hatreds . . . Joyce never uses a cliché in innocence.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment. Until then, America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For those thousands in the south tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future. Terrorism is political communication by other means. The message of September 11 ran as follows: America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated. United Airlines Flight 175 was an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile aimed at her innocence. That innocence, it was here being claimed, was a luxurious and anachronistic delusion.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A week after the attack, one is free to taste the bile of its atrocious ingenuity. It is already trite — but stringently necessary — to emphasise that such a mise en scène would have embarrassed a studio executive's storyboard or a thriller-writer's notebook ("What happened today was not credible," were the wooden words of Tom Clancy, the author of The Sum of All Fears). And yet in broad daylight and full consciousness that outline became established reality: a score or so of Stanley knives produced two million tons of rubble.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This moment was the apotheosis of the postmodern era — the era of images and perceptions. Wind conditions were also favourable; within hours, Manhattan looked as though it had taken 10 megatons.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Violence must come; America must have catharsis. We would hope that the response will be, above all, non-escalatory. It should also mirror the original attack in that it should have the capacity to astonish. A utopian example: the crippled and benighted people of Afghanistan, hunkering down for a winter of famine, should not be bombarded with cruise missiles; they should be bombarded with consignments of food, firmly marked LENDLEASE — USA.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our best destiny, as planetary cohabitants, is the development of what has been called "species consciousness" — something over and above nationalisms, blocs, religions, ethnicities. During this week of incredulous misery, I have been trying to apply such a consciousness, and such a sensibility. Thinking of the victims, the perpetrators, and the near future, I felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“PC is low, low church — it is the lowest common denomination.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After September 11, then, writers faced quantitative change, but not qualitative change. In the following days and weeks, the voices coming from their rooms were very quiet; still, they were individual voices, and playfully rational, all espousing the ideology of no ideology. They stood in eternal opposition to the voice of the lonely crowd, which, with its yearning for both power and effacement, is the most desolate sound you will ever hear. "Desolate": "giving an impression of bleak and dismal emptiness... from L. desolat-, desolare 'abandon', from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone'.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We accept that there are legitimate casus belli: acts or situations "provoking or justifying war". The present debate feels off-centre, and faintly unreal, because the US and the UK are going to war for a new set of reasons (partly undisclosed) while continuing to adduce the old set of reasons (which in this case do not cohere or even overlap).”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All US presidents — and all US presidential candidates — have to be religious or have to pretend to be religious. More specifically, they have to subscribe to "born again" Christianity. Bush, with his semi-compulsory prayer-breakfasts and so on, isn't pretending to be religious... We hear about the successful "Texanisation" of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Saddam's hands-on years in the dungeons distinguish him from the other great dictators of the 20th century, none of whom had much taste for "the wet stuff". The mores of his regime have been shaped by this taste for the wet stuff — by a fascinated negative intimacy with the human body, and a connoisseurship of human pain.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are two rules of war that have not yet been invalidated by the new world order. The first rule is that the belligerent nation must be fairly sure that its actions will make things better; the second rule is that the belligerent nation must be more or less certain that its actions won't make things worse. America could perhaps claim to be satisfying the first rule (while admitting that the improvement may be only local and short term). It cannot begin to satisfy the second.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I once wrote, in The Information, that an Englishman wouldn't bother to attend a reading even if the author in question was his favorite living writer, and also his long-lost brother — even if the reading was taking place next door. Whereas Americans go out and do things. But Meeting the Author, for me, is Meeting the Reader. Some of the little exchanges that take place over the signing table I find very fortifying: they make up for some of the other stuff you get.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'd like to be remembered as someone who kept the comic novel going for another generation or so. I fear the comic novel is in retreat. A joke is by definition politically incorrect — it assumes a butt, and a certain superiority in the teller. The culture won't put up with that for much longer.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have been outflanked by the culture. I am now seen as a drawling Oxonian, and a genetic elitist, who took over the family firm. People subconsciously think that I was born in 1922, wrote Lucky Jim when I was 7, and will live for at least a century. This feels odd to me, because my father was a "angry young man" and helped democratize the British novel. I'm not a toff. I'm a yob.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm not sure what the American convulsion at the moment is, but I get the impression that people have moved beyond political correctness there by now. But here it lingers, although much ridiculed.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It now seems that pornography is the leading sex educator in the Western world. And the idea of having your sexual nature determined by a medallion-in-the-chest-hair artist out in Los Angeles is really humiliating. I'm not talking about me, but I'm talking about my children's contemporaries, kids aged 18. They're getting their sex tips from some charlatan at Wicked Video.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it's a very confused culture. On the one hand, no one is better than anyone else; no one is prettier. On the other hand, everyone is completely obsessed by their looks and by how they strike the world. On the one hand, we're all equal; on the other hand, everyone's a superstar. It's all very irrational, like all ideology.”
Martin Amis (1949–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source