Top 250 Martin Amis Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Martin Amis

153. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

157. “If you feel you have a strong constituency among the young, you can really die happy, because the great unanswered question, the only valid value judgment is whether you’re going to last, and that tells you that you are, for a bit at least.”

— Martin Amis

Featured in: Strong Quotes

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— 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. “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

167. “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

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

— Martin Amis

169. “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

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

— Martin Amis

171. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Martin Amis

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Martin Amis

187. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

190. “Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Khrushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: ‘He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones.”

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

196. “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

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

— Martin Amis

198. “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

199. “For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don’t want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.”

— Martin Amis

200. “Well, we cry and twist and are naked at both ends of life. We cry at both ends of life, while the doctor watches.”

— Martin Amis