Martin Amis Quotes

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.

Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.

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

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.

Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them.

These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.

Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.

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

You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal

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

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

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

People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.

Style isn't something added on; it's intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life.

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.

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

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.

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

Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism.

Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

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

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.

It's without doubt my main subject. The way masculinity can go wrong. And I'm something of a gynocrat in a utopian kind of way.

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.

The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.

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.

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is...to impress your personality on the road.

This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.

All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.

To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.

[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.

Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

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.

More will mean worse.

Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.