Top 250 Martin Amis Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Style isn’t something added on; it’s intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life.”

— Martin Amis

102. “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

103. “The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.”

— Martin Amis

104. “Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them.”

— Martin Amis

105. “Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice – registry offices, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ the disposable diaper – is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.”

— Martin Amis

106. “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

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

— Martin Amis

108. “Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn’t you say?”

— Martin Amis

109. “You can’t be up the reader’s ass, as many a writer I think is – cute as hell, ingratiating as hell. But that’s not loving the reader in the right way. That’s toadying to the reader.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

111. “In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.”

— Martin Amis

112. “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.”

— Martin Amis

113. “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.”

— Martin Amis

114. “At its grandest, political correctness is an attempt to accelerate evolution.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

116. “How do you think the world popped into existence? – I’d say wee we are at least five Albert Einsteins away from answering this question.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

118. “You shun your spirit,′ he murmured, ’every time you agree to sell your days to the city, to measure out your life at the city’s pace.”

— Martin Amis

119. “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.”

— Martin Amis

120. “Points of a journey do not matter when the journey has no destination, only an end.”

— Martin Amis

121. “Suffering doesn’t concern itself with the scale of other sufferings. It has no community sense. It isn’t relative, is it. I can’t be the only one to have noticed that. Whoever said it first – did they have more to say? The.”

— Martin Amis

122. “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.”

— Martin Amis

123. “The night was electric – The night was in italics.”

— Martin Amis

124. “Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.”

— Martin Amis

125. “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.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

128. “Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.”

— Martin Amis

129. “I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it “vow-of-poverty prose.” No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.”

— Martin Amis

130. “All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father’s peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on ’defamatory.”

— Martin Amis

131. “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

132. “London is where people go in order to come back from it sadder and wiser.”

— Martin Amis

133. “Don’t dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.”

— Martin Amis

134. “Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.”

— Martin Amis

135. “I will now take the chance to repeat my contention that the drama is handily inferior to the novel and the poem. Dramatists who have lasted more than a century include Shakespeare and – who else? One is soon reaching for a sepulchral Norwegian. Compare that to English poetry and its great waves of immortality. I agree that it is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright. I scream with laughter about it all the time. This is one of God’s best jokes.”

— Martin Amis

136. “I’m afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.”

— Martin Amis

137. “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

138. “He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by the god called Time? It won’t be that convulsive, heart-bursting spell between twenty-eight and thirty-five. No. It’ll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three.”

— Martin Amis

139. “America is sick about health: America, where strokes and heart attacks come with a price tag, and where the doctors carry on like slum landlords or war profiteers. And Americans admire it – this triage of the wallet.”

— Martin Amis

140. “Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don’t feel the deeper rhythm there. I don’t think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it’s the only way they can write.”

— Martin Amis

141. “People who go to the Opera, they don’t go to the toilet, not even at home.”

— Martin Amis

142. “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

143. “I think I’m losing my bottle. I think I’m going tonto.”

— Martin Amis

144. “It’s hard to make progress with grief.”

— Martin Amis

145. “You can’t sort of write the novel as if you’re taking dictation from heaven.”

— Martin Amis

146. “Pain is nature’s way of telling us that something is wrong. Patiently, pain goes on telling us this, long after we’ve got the message.”

— Martin Amis

147. “John Updike once argued that although fiction can withstand any amount of egocentricity, it is wholly allergic to narcissism.”

— Martin Amis

148. “As so often when Mr Rhodes gets grateful and reverent, you have to read the sentence twice, even though you didn’t want to read it once.”

— Martin Amis

149. “When we enter the arctic labyrinth known as Late James, the retreat from the reader, the embrace of introversion, is as emphatic as that of Joyce, and far more fiendishly prolonged.”

— Martin Amis

150. “Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last, you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.”

— Martin Amis