Top 250 Martin Amis Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I’m afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.”

— Martin Amis

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “Like most people, I feel ambiguous guilt for my inferiors, ambiguous envy for my superiors, and mandatory low-spirits about the system itself.”

— Martin Amis

157. “When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.”

— Martin Amis

158. “America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

160. “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

161. “Novelists don’t age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.”

— Martin Amis

162. “And what was astrology? Astrology was the consecration of the homocentric universe. Astrology went further than saying that the stars were all about us. Astrology said that the stars were all about me.”

— Martin Amis

163. “It’s without doubt my main subject. The way masculinity can go wrong. And I’m something of a gynocrat in a utopian kind of way.”

— Martin Amis

164. “You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren’t many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can’t work.”

— Martin Amis

165. “Have you noticed, now, the way people talk so loudly in snackbars and cinemas, how the shelved back gardens shudder with prodigies of talentlessness, drummers, penny-whistlers, vying transistors, the way you see and hear the curses and sign-language of high sexual drama at the bus-stops under ghosts of clouds, how life has come out of doors? And in the soaked pubs the old-timers wince and weather the canned rock. We talk louder to make ourselves heard. We will all be screamers soon.”

— Martin Amis

166. “I think a lot of people who read fiction are interested in subtlety. But they wouldn’t like my stuff. It’s a bit too violent for many tastes.”

— Martin Amis

167. “The criminal resembles the artist in his pretension, his incompetence, and his self-pity.”

— Martin Amis

168. “Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. A religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.”

— Martin Amis

169. “Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.”

— Martin Amis

170. “Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences.”

— Martin Amis

171. “Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing.”

— Martin Amis

172. “Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.”

— Martin Amis

173. “The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was ‘better’ than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America.”

— Martin Amis

174. “The literary interview won’t tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.”

— Martin Amis

175. “I was informed by my viscera that now was the time to put my arm around her shoulders. I ignored them.”

— Martin Amis

176. “Whether they soothe or snarl, cringe or strut, suicide notes do not seek to entertain. I.”

— Martin Amis

177. “My calculations about how to stay alive and sane on this particular planet have clearly been at fault. Lots of people are plenty uglier and poorer than me without seeming to mind, without the self-hate and self-pity – the sentimentality, in a word – that makes me such a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude.”

— Martin Amis

178. “I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bare to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there’s nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won’t see any reason not to do you harm.”

— Martin Amis

179. “I was once asked: ‘Are you an Islamophobe?’ And the answer is no. What I am is an Islamismophobe, or better say an anti-Islamist, because a phobia is an irrational fear, and it is not irrational to fear something that says it wants to kill you.”

— Martin Amis

180. “I want incremental improvements. There’s the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general – it’s dreadful.”

— Martin Amis

181. “Twenty-two poems covered the period from Lev’s first serious efforts to his arrest in 1948 at the age of nineteen. Very Mandelstamian, I adjudged: well-made, and studiously conversational, and coming close, here and there, to the images that really hurt and connect.”

— Martin Amis

182. “He didn’t want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.”

— Martin Amis

183. “And now, at dusk, outside my window, the trees shake their heads like disco dancers in the strobe lights of nightlife long ago.”

— Martin Amis

184. “When I see a lot of young faces in the audience, it’s just sort of sinking in how important that is. Because you’re old enough now to identify them very strongly as being young – whereas before, of course they were young, because you were young. Now it’s not like that.”

— Martin Amis

185. “Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more than the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes.”

— Martin Amis

186. “The militant Utopian, the perfectibilizer, from the outset, is in a malevolent rage at the obvious fact of human imperfectibility.”

— Martin Amis

187. “Now I have to lie on the bed for a few minutes and let the solitude gather round me once more.”

— Martin Amis

188. “Beneath the clock was an enormous arrow, on which was printed: Change Here For Eastern Trains. But time had no arrow, not here.”

— Martin Amis

189. “Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I’m too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.”

— Martin Amis

190. “The driver treated his cab as a peasant might treat his horse or ass, with numb and proprietorial cruelty. The bursts of acceleration were like long-toothed, lip-flapping exhalations; then came the looping whinny of the brakes.”

— Martin Amis

191. “Suicide is a mind-body problem that ends violently and without any winner. I.”

— Martin Amis

192. “He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.”

— Martin Amis

193. “The world is boiling. You hardly dare open a paper these days: the news is all of cataclysm and collapse. Tempers are threadbare; the yobs are winning; everybody accepts the fact that they’ve got to get nastier in order to survive. The world is going bad on us. I’m having nothing to do with it.”

— Martin Amis

194. “Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic – you want all those inequalities, because that’s what makes life interesting.”

— Martin Amis

195. “It is straightforward – and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.”

— Martin Amis

196. “All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work – or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.”

— Martin Amis

197. “In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people.”

— Martin Amis

198. “Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief – unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses.”

— Martin Amis

199. “Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.”

— Martin Amis

200. “Novelists don’t normally write about what’s going on; they write about what’s not going on.”

— Martin Amis