Top 250 Martin Amis Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

103. “I hire tea by the tea bag.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

105. “Style isn’t something added on; it’s intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life.”

— Martin Amis

106. “Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I’m in a funk about it, I’ve got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.”

— Martin Amis

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

112. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

117. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

121. “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

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

— Martin Amis

123. “There are many accounts of prison floors strewn with genitals, breasts, tongues, eyes and ears. Arma virumque cano, and Hitler-Stalin tells us this, among other things: given total power over another, the human being will find that his thoughts turn to torture.”

— Martin Amis

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Martin Amis

128. “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

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

— Martin Amis

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Martin Amis

133. “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

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

— Martin Amis

135. “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

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

— Martin Amis

137. “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

138. “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

139. “What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

141. “It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.”

— 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. “London is full of short stories, long stories, epics, farces, sit-coms, soaps and squibs, walking round hand in hand.”

— Martin Amis

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

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

— Martin Amis

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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