Top 250 Martin Amis Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “There isn’t what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press – where they’re looking around for something to attack. You don’t feel that there’s a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.”

— Martin Amis

205. “And while Trish stared – stared, as it now seemed, into her own eyes – Guy held her hand and watched the crowd: how it bled colour from the enormous room and drew all energy towards itself, forming one triumphal being; how it trembled, then burst or came or died, releasing individuality; and how the champion was borne along on its subsidence, his back slapped, his hair tousled, mimed by female hands and laughing, like the god of mobs.”

— Martin Amis

206. “Q: What’s the difference between a Communist car and a Communist proselytizer? A: You can close the door on a Communist proselytizer.”

— Martin Amis

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Martin Amis

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.”

— Martin Amis

215. “Often it doesn’t occur to you what kind of novel you’re writing until quite late on.”

— Martin Amis

216. “America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn’t sure what it was.”

— Martin Amis

217. “You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.”

— Martin Amis

218. “In the solitude of my cell I have come to the bitter realisation that I have sinned gravely against humanity.”

— Martin Amis

219. “If we all downed tools and joined hands for ten minutes and stopped believing in money, then money would no longer exist. We never will, of course. Maybe money is the great conspiracy, the great fiction. The great addiction too: we’re all addicted and we can’t break the habit now. There’s not even anything very twentieth century about it, except the disposition. You just can’t kick it, that junk, even if you want to. You can’t get the money monkey off your back.”

— Martin Amis

220. “It’s a drag, not being young, but at least I don’t have to take a test tomorrow morning.”

— Martin Amis

221. “I would say I’m an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just turn up the volume dial. Which is a technique of science fiction, apart from anything else.”

— Martin Amis

222. “Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you’re trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.”

— Martin Amis

223. “One recalls John Updike’s argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so.”

— Martin Amis

224. “It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.”

— Martin Amis

225. “My belief is that everything that’s written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn’t take any notice of it.”

— Martin Amis

226. “I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.”

— Martin Amis

227. “The past weaves all around this; we still duck in and out of its lost but shimmering kingdoms.”

— Martin Amis

228. “The satirist isn’t just looking at things ironically but militantly – he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.”

— Martin Amis

229. “Films are all luck and anarchy.”

— Martin Amis

230. “America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.”

— Martin Amis

231. “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

232. “In a conclusive rebuke to the Nazi idea, these ‘subhumans’, it turns out, were the cream of humankind. And.”

— Martin Amis

233. “I’m not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I’m 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle – that’s what fiction is, and should be.”

— Martin Amis

234. “I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bear to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there’s nothing for you here.”

— Martin Amis

235. “He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this; had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.”

— Martin Amis

236. “What was Richard? He was a revenger, in what was probably intended to be a comedy.”

— Martin Amis

237. “But you’ve got to do it in the end. You have to end up with somebody. Because otherwise you go mad, or you start worrying about going mad, which is even worse. You can’t go on sleeping alone.”

— Martin Amis

238. “The hot macadam pulled on his shoes, like desire...”

— Martin Amis

239. “They say that it is one of the most terrifying manifestations in nature: a bull elephant in a state of must. Twin streams of vile-smelling liquid flow from the ducts of the temples and into the corners of the jaws. At these times the great beast will gore giraffes and hippos, will break the backs of cringeing rhinoceri. This was male-elephantine heat. Must: it derived via Urdu from the Persian mast or maest – “intoxicated.” But I had settled for the modal verb. I must, I must, I just must.”

— Martin Amis

240. “We’re nowhere near young enough for the present war, but when the world war comes – we’ll be just right to fight it. We are, after all, a superb physical specimen. Our feet aren’t flat. Our vision is clear. We’re not clubfooted or Marxist or nuts. We have no conscientious objections or anything of that kind. We’re perfect.”

— Martin Amis

241. “Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.”

— Martin Amis

242. “Robert Conquest once suggested that ’a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler.”

— Martin Amis

243. “Blood and bodies and death and power.”

— Martin Amis

244. “I try to like the way the world is changing, but there seems to be no extra room for me inside.”

— Martin Amis

245. “No longer can I bear with the ruined god, betrayed and beaten by his own magic. Calling on powers best left unsummoned, he took human beings apart – and then he put them back together again.”

— Martin Amis

246. “Deciding to write a novel about something – as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something – sounds to me like a good evocation of writer’s block.”

— Martin Amis

247. “Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to the culture of the waiting room. Piped music, the language of calming suasion. Come this way – yes, the flight attendant will see you now. Airports, junk novels: they were taking your mind off mortal fear.”

— Martin Amis

248. “It’s an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That’s an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise – except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.”

— Martin Amis

249. “Love finds me difficult.”

— Martin Amis

250. “Aged seventy-three, he had just finished a book on the King’s English; and now English was a language the King no longer had. His fate was a brutal reminder. We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains.”

— Martin Amis