Top 250 Martin Amis Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go.”

— Martin Amis

52. “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

53. “One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction. I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled.”

— Martin Amis

54. “All the things we value in society don’t mean much in fiction.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

56. “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.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

58. “Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time.”

— Martin Amis

59. “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.”

— Martin Amis

60. “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

61. “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.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

63. “To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever.”

— Martin Amis

64. “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

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

— Martin Amis

66. “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

67. “When communism failed, it wasn’t a good idea that had gone wrong, it was a bad idea that had been sustained with incredible determination in the face of all the commonsense arguments, and at the cost of 20 million lives at least, in Russia, to build the socialist Utopia.”

— Martin Amis

68. “The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it’s not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I’ve met, and think they’re incredibly witty, inventive – there’s a lot of poetry there.”

— Martin Amis

69. “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.”

— Martin Amis

70. “Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.”

— Martin Amis

71. “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.”

— Martin Amis

72. “To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

74. “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.”

— Martin Amis

75. “Happiness writes white: it doesn’t show up on the page.”

— Martin Amis

76. “Doesn’t Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?”

— Martin Amis

77. “My life looked good on paper – where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.”

— Martin Amis

78. “Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark – spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It’s passing, yet I’m the one who’s doing all the moving.”

— Martin Amis

79. “Marriage is always something of a compromise, as I’m sure you’re now aware. Any long-term relationship is – and one does have to see it in the long term, Charles. No, I expect your mother and myself will never divorce. It’s uneconomic and, at my age, usually unnecessary.”

— Martin Amis

80. “Let me give you a lesson on war, Golo. Rule number one: never invade Russia.”

— Martin Amis

81. “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.”

— Martin Amis

82. “All rooms are waiting rooms. Your room is a waiting room. You are waiting, I am waiting. Everything is getting nearer to being over.”

— Martin Amis

83. “Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won’t get there so quick, not by natural means. You buy your ticket and you climb on board. That ticket costs everything you have. But it’s just a one-way. This train takes you into the night, and leaves you there. It’s the night train. Now.”

— Martin Amis

84. “My theory is – we don’t really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and ask quickly if anybody’s there.”

— Martin Amis

85. “How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing towards me over the uneven ground.”

— Martin Amis

86. “Here’s another joke: “She calls me up and says, ‘Get over here. There’s nobody home.’ So I get over there, and guess what. There’s nobody home.”

— Martin Amis

87. “When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don’t say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.”

— Martin Amis

88. “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.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

90. “While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw – that of outright unreadability.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

93. “He had promised my payout would be halfway to six figures. And it was. It was three figures.”

— Martin Amis

94. “Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It’s not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence.”

— Martin Amis

95. “Is that why the parents of dead children spend half the rest of their lives in darkened rooms? Are they hoping the ghosts will return with all their original power? She.”

— Martin Amis

96. “Esprit de l’escalier: spirit of the staircase, wishing you’d said, wishing you’d done. Yet how much more indelible it was when the staircase was the staircase that led to the bedroom.”

— Martin Amis

97. “He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.”

— Martin Amis

98. “Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown.”

— Martin Amis

99. “Suicide, like Aspirin, like everything else, costs money. And I didn’t have any. Unless you’re really brave, suicide is always gonna set you back a couple of bob.”

— Martin Amis

100. “Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.”

— Martin Amis