Martin Amis Quotes

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.

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

Laughter always forgives.

It's hard to make progress with grief.

Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.

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

The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.

So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

I'm not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I'm 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle - that's what fiction is, and should be.

Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic - you want all those inequalities, because that's what makes life interesting.

Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?

When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

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

I can imagine in a century or two that rule by women will be seen as a better bet than rule by men. What's wrong with men is that they tend to look for the violent solution. Women don't.

Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.

It's a young country and a German only feels comfortable being with the masses. They have very little talent at creating an inner life, privacy. And I think there must be something wrong.

While making love, we often talk about money. I like it. I like that dirty talk

The egotism of people who are eminent without being in the least distinguished and somehow feeling that's their due - that seems to me to be a peculiarly English phenomenon.

You use a different part of your heart with girls.

I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.

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.

It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.

What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism.

You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.

I think writers are excited by stupidity and bad behavior, generally.

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.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

In the concordance of Nicola Six's kisses there were many subheads and subsections, many genres and phyla - chapter and verse, cross-references, multiple citations.

I sometimes feel I'm a sort of cult writer, rather than a mainstream writer, in that those who like my stuff like it a lot, but the appeal is not that broad.

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.

They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.

The Uruguayans have a sort of purity. I don't know where they got it, and I doubt even if they know from where they got it. Perhaps they didn't kill off their major population.

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

It is straightforward — and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.

Has it ever happened to you...? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you're going to remember that moment for the rest of your life.

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

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.

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.

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

Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.

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.

The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.

The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.

Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.

Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.

I don't think I'd like Manhattan anymore. My mother-in-law lives there, and you go there. But I like looking at it from a distance. It's a fantastic sight - every time, it awes me.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.