Top 250 Martin Amis Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

4. “The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you’re bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.”

— Martin Amis

5. “The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.”

— Martin Amis

6. “Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.”

— Martin Amis

7. “Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

9. “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.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

12. “Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

16. “I think all writers have a bit of genius in them, and a bit of talent. Genius retreats but talent improves.”

— Martin Amis

17. “More will mean worse.”

— Martin Amis

18. “And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

20. “We all have names we don’t know about.”

— Martin Amis

21. “Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

23. “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.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

25. “Suffering doesn’t concern itself with the scale of other sufferings.”

— Martin Amis

26. “Terror, perhaps, is always a confession of illegitimacy.”

— Martin Amis

27. “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.”

— Martin Amis

28. “It’s a funny language, German. For one thing, everybody shouts it.”

— Martin Amis

29. “You use a different part of your heart with girls.”

— Martin Amis

30. “Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It’s nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that... Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women – and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses – will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, “What is it?” And the men will say, “Nothing. No it isn’t anything really. Just sad dreams.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

32. “People look at fame and feel deprived if they haven’t got it, feeling that this is a basic, almost a human right, a civil right. And also feel the same way about wealth, I suppose – why haven’t I got it?”

— Martin Amis

33. “Laughter always forgives.”

— Martin Amis

34. “Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.”

— Martin Amis

35. “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.”

— Martin Amis

36. “Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it’s a full-time job looking the other way.”

— Martin Amis

37. “The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.”

— Martin Amis

38. “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

39. “Oh man sometimes I wake up feel like a cat runover. Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it’s heavy. Oh it’s hard. It isn’t easy. Jesus, I never meant me any harm. All I wanted was a good time.”

— Martin Amis

40. “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

41. “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.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

49. “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.”

— Martin Amis

50. “No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected – you write about it after it’s over.”

— Martin Amis