Martin Amis quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Martin Amis

Top Martin Amis Quotes

Browse top 157 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Martin Amis.

Favorite Martin Amis Quotes

1. "The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own." ~ Martin Amis

2. "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." ~ Martin Amis

3. "Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn." ~ Martin Amis

4. "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." ~ Martin Amis

5. "When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise." ~ Martin Amis

6. "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." ~ Martin Amis

7. "...So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answered everywhere you looked, in every headline and haircut: if, at any moment, nothing might matter, then who said that nothing didn't matter already?" ~ Martin Amis

8. "Now they were all moving to no effect-just moving, just switching things off and switching things on, just picking things up and putting things down and picking things up and stroking the cat and counting the mugs and fighting for air. It seemed that everything they did had already been done and done, and that everything they thought had already been thought and thought, and that this would never end. Excuse me said panic to each of them in turn. They had no mouth and they had to scream." ~ Martin Amis

9. "You are as well prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital; and your skin is a beautiful color. Look at you – look at the burnish of you." ~ Martin Amis

10. "In the last months of the war, when I raped in uniform – we were, by then, so full of death (and the destruction of everything we had and knew) that the act of love, even in travesty, felt like a spell against the riot of murder." ~ Martin Amis

11. "As I've already mentioned, 1984 and I were getting on famously. A no-frills setup, run without sentiment, snobbery or cultural favouritism, Airstrip One seemed like my kind of town. (I saw myself as an idealistic young corporal in the Thought Police.)" ~ Martin Amis

12. "Once, as he inhaled with his customary vehemence, I had a thought that made my armpits come alive." ~ Martin Amis

13. "He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed." ~ Martin Amis

14. "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." ~ Martin Amis

15. "When you've lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour." ~ Martin Amis

16. "The ad world used to be something of a refuge for literary types. But I feared for myself at J.W.T. It seemed to be entirely peopled by blocked dramatists, likeably shambling poets, and one-off novelists. The whole place felt like a clubworld sunset home for literary talent." ~ Martin Amis

17. "It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can't respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubation period.Source: http://www.euronews.com/2013/06/25/ma..." ~ Martin Amis

18. "The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present." ~ Martin Amis

19. "So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me." ~ Martin Amis

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

21. "No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see." ~ Martin Amis

22. "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

23. "Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands." ~ Martin Amis

24. "Dove saremmo Tod e io senza il gabinetto? Dove saremmo senza tutta la spazzatura?" ~ Martin Amis

25. "Era novembre. Gli umani si erano fatto crescere cappotti invernali e gli alti edifici tremavano nella stretta soffocante degli equilibri tra le diverse tensioni." ~ Martin Amis

26. "La città - è la città che dovrà guarirli, con lame di coltello e automobili, manganelli, colpi d'arma da fuoco. I cavi allentati e le pericolose costruzioni in muratura della città telecinetica." ~ Martin Amis

27. "What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?" ~ Martin Amis

28. "Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief." ~ Martin Amis

29. "Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit." ~ Martin Amis

30. "My clothes are made of monosodium glutamate and hexachlorophene. My food is made of polyester, rayon and lurex. My rug lotions contain vitamins. Do my vitamins feature cleaning agents? I hope so. My brain is gimmicked by a microprocessor the size of a quark, and costing ten pee and running the whole deal. I am made of — junk, I'm just junk." ~ Martin Amis

31. "To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year." ~ Martin Amis

32. "When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air." ~ Martin Amis

33. "Imagine the terrestrial timespan as an outstretched arm: a single swipe of an emery-board, across the nail of the third finger, erases human history. We haven't been around for very long. And we've turned the earth's hair white. Sh e seemed to have eternal youth but now she's ageing awful fast, like an addict, like a waxless candle. Jesus, have you seen her recently? we used to live and die without any sense of the planet getting older, of mother earth getting older, living and dying. We used to live outside history. But now we're all coterminous. We're inside history now all right, on its leading edge, with the wind ripping past our ears. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. And maybe love can't bear it either, and flees all planets when they reach this condition, when they get to the end of their twentieth centuries." ~ Martin Amis

34. "You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change." ~ Martin Amis

35. "He could take one look at me- at the ashtray, the bottle, the four pots of coffee, my face, and my gut set like a stone on the white band of the towel- he could take one look at me and be pretty sure i ran on heavy fuel." ~ Martin Amis

36. "I've got two backs, me - and I'm glad! Tits can be . . . mwa, I know, but they're always in the bloody road. Even in bed." ~ Martin Amis

37. "On dope he sometimes thought that all the televisions on Calchalk Street were softly cackling about Richard Tull: news flashes about his most recent failures, panel discussions about his obscurity, his neglect." ~ Martin Amis

38. "Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever." ~ Martin Amis

39. "What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves." ~ Martin Amis

40. "Einstein's Monsters," by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now." ~ Martin Amis

41. "Some junk novels were all about airports. Some junk novels were even called things like Airport. Why, then you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? …Junk novels have been around for at least as long as non-junk novels, and airports haven't been around for very long at all. But they both really took off at the same time. Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport." ~ Martin Amis

42. "By 12.30, Giles had consumed five gin-rickies, four gin-and-tonics, three gin-and-its, two gin-and-bitters, and one gin." ~ Martin Amis

43. "So this was all you got:the zooty sideburns and masturbator's pallor of an old Ted in a black suit and the secular obsequies." ~ Martin Amis

44. "Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually." ~ Martin Amis

45. "Impartially, shrewdly, I considered suicide, though not in my worst moments. The bottle of pills. The note: 'No hard feelings, everyone, but I've thought about it and it's just not on, is it? It's nearly on, but not quite. No? Anyway, all the best, C." ~ Martin Amis

46. "Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life" ~ Martin Amis

47. "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." ~ Martin Amis

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

49. "Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls." ~ Martin Amis

50. "Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change." ~ Martin Amis

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Rebecka laughs through her tears. There is almost too much laughter. It bubbles over because she has cried so much she has created an empty space, ready to be filled with another feeling."
Author: Åsa Larsson

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