Top 250 Martin Amis Quotes (2026 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. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Martin Amis

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Martin Amis

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Martin Amis

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Martin Amis

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Martin Amis

183. “In bereavement, make yourself better, not bitter.”

— Martin Amis

184. “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

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

— Martin Amis

186. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Martin Amis

195. “What could never be endured, it turned out, was the last swathe of time before sleep came, the path from larger day to huger night, a little death when the mind was still alive and fluttering. Thus.”

— Martin Amis

196. “I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they’re not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.”

— Martin Amis

197. “How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist’s couch or even the lovers’ bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.”

— Martin Amis

198. “Women can die gently -... -. Men always die in torment. Why? Towards the end, men break the habit of a lifetime, and start blaming themselves, with full male severity. Women break a habit too, and start blaming themselves no longer. They forgive.”

— Martin Amis

199. “The sun was looking down on this, but not quite sincerely.”

— Martin Amis

200. “Demi’s linguistic quirk is essentially and definingly female. It just is. Drawing in breath to denounce this proposition, women will often come out with something like, “Up you!” or “Ballshit!” For I am referring to Demi’s use of the conflated or mangled catchphrase – Demi’s speech-bargains: she wanted two for the price of one. The result was expressive, and you usually knew what she meant, given the context.”

— Martin Amis