Martin Amis Quotes

Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.

I don't think I've ever been particularly scared of death - but scared of dying, the process. It doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

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

One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.

My 12-year-old daughter said to me, "Enough with the subtitles, Daddy, for crying out loud." Because they always seem to cloud the issue rather than clarify it.

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

Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.

Every day, the dispensing of existence.... Its face is fierce and distant and ancient.

My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

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

We all have names we don't know about.

It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.

My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.

Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.

No-one is going to sit down and read Bleak House to the family any more, but they can all huddle up happily in front of Charles Bronson.

He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.

Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.

He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.

My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.

I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

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.

I hire tea by the tea bag.

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.

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

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.

There's a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer's views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.

Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing.

America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.

You can't sort of write the novel as if you're taking dictation from heaven.

I want incremental improvements. There's the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general - it's dreadful.

When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.

Often it doesn't occur to you what kind of novel you're writing until quite late on.

It's good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don't know what he's going to do - I have to find my way.

I think a lot of people who read fiction are interested in subtlety. But they wouldn't like my stuff. It's a bit too violent for many tastes.

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

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.

Belief is otiose reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.

…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.

Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief.

Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness.

Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences.

Now I have to lie on the bed for a few minutes and let the solitude gather round me once more.