Martin Amis Quotes

144 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
If people have personal conversations about very emotional matters in public, and people reveal parts of their body that were originally kept covered, and pornography is becoming semi-respectable, it makes you think the push for greater freedom and divesting yourself of inhibitions is a real human need. I'm 54, so I'm further back upon the road. We certainly did a fair amount of divesting ourselves of inhibitions, but there seems to have been a quantum leap in the last half a generation. Maybe we're destined to be freer, but it's taking odd forms, like showing your big gut to all the world and discussing the future of your marriage at a bus stop with 30 people listening in.

Martin Amis
Sunday morning, and everyone was staggering around with their personal burden of prolixity, of fantastic garrulity, of uncontainable communicativeness: the Sunday Times.

Martin Amis
Making lots of money – it's not that hard, you know. It's overestimated. Making lots of money is a breeze. You watch.

Martin Amis
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
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
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
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
You can't be consumed by another person if you're a writer because your relationship is basically with yourself. You're being intimate with your abilities, with your talent. This means in some very viable sense that for a lot of the time you're just having a wank.

Martin Amis
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.

Martin Amis
Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.

Martin Amis
Viewed at its grandest, P. C. is an attempt to accelerate evolution. To speak truthfully, while that's still okay, everybody is a racist or has racial prejudices. This is because human beings tend to like the similar, the familiar, the familial. Again, I say, I am a racist. I am not as racist as my parents. My children will not be as racist as I am. Freedom from racial prejudice is what we hope for down the line. Impatient with this hope, this process, P. C. seeks to get things done right now. In a generation or at the snap of a finger, you can simply announce yourself to be purged of these atavisms.

Martin Amis
You try to think about where you are going, not where you came from, though what sometimes happens is that you get stuck, and it's really not what you're about to do that's stumping you, it's something you've already done that isn't right. You have to go back and fix that.

Martin Amis
Plots really matter only in thrillers. In mainstream writing the plot is—what is it? A hook. The reader is going to wonder how things turn out.

Martin Amis
It isn't that the beau monde was too big for Capote's talents. The beau monde was too small for Capote's talents. Here, at least, in human terms the Very Rich are very poor. Interestingly, they are not interesting; incredibly, they are not even credible. They are certainly not the 'unspoiled monsters' of Capote's chapter title: they are spoiled mediocrities, they are boring freaks. The backgammon bums, the sweating champagne buckets, 'the Racquet Club, Le Jockey, the Links, White's', 'Lafayette, The Colony, La Grenouille, La Caravelle', 'Vuitton cases, Battistoni shirts, Lanvin suits, Peal shoes': how keen can a writer afford to be on all this?

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

Martin Amis
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
Kingsley fell over. And this was no brisk trip or tumble. It was an act of colossal administration. First came a kind of slow-leak effect, giving me the immediate worry that Kingsley, when fully deflated, would spread out into the street on both sides of the island, where there were cars, trucks, sneezing buses. Next, as I grabbed and tugged, he felt like a great ship settling on its side: would it right itself, or go under? Then came an impression of overall dissolution and the loss of basic physical coherence. I groped around him, looking for places to shore him up, but every bit of him was falling, dropping, seeking the lowest level, like a mudslide.

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

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 literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly, to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.

Martin Amis
I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.

Martin Amis
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