Top 247 Quotes & Sayings by Martin Amis

Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.

All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.

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.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

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.

Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

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.

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.

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.

Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it's a funny thing, but I'm an exception to that rule.'

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.

Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'

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

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, 'Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.'

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.

If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.

Watching an adaptation of your novel can be a violent experience: seeing your old jokes suddenly thrust at you can be alarming. But I started to enjoy 'Money' very quickly, and then I relaxed.

When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.

When I wrote 'The Pregnant Widow' three or four years ago, I tried to reread my first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' because their young heroes are the same age. I couldn't finish it. It seemed to me so technically slapdash and weak.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired. More than that, they both lived their lives 'beautifully'--not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been a prerequisite), but in the droll fortitude of their perseverance. They got the work done, with style.

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.

It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, as it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay.

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.

My theory is - we don’t really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and ask quickly if anybody’s there.

Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.

Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.

More will mean worse.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them.

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.