Martin Amis Quotes

144 Sourced Quotes

After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship—marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest.

Martin Amis
Iron John, a short work of psychological, literary and anthropological speculation by the poet Robert Bly, dominated the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year and made, as we shall see, a significant impact on many aspects of American life. In England, it made no impression whatever. … We are British over in Britain, we are skeptical, ironical, et cetera, and are not given, as Americans are, to seeking expert advice on basic matters. Especially such matters as our manhood. In England, maleness itself has become an embarrassment: male consciousness, male pride, male rage, we don't want to hear about.

Martin Amis
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
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
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
They can't ban or burn Larkin's books. What they can embark on is the more genteel process of literary demotion.

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

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
As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to see it.

Martin Amis
The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was 'better' than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America.

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
If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.

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

Martin Amis
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
While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw--that of outright unreadability.

Martin Amis
We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

Martin Amis
Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

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
When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

Martin Amis
Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions.

Martin Amis
Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

Martin Amis