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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Martin Amis

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Martin Amis

208. “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

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

— Martin Amis

210. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

214. “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

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

— Martin Amis

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

225. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Martin Amis

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “Films are all luck and anarchy.”

— Martin Amis

235. “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

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

— Martin Amis

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Martin Amis

240. “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

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

— Martin Amis

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

— Martin Amis

243. “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

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