Martin Amis quotes - page 3

Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. (Martin Amis)
Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black. View quote
Martin Amis
All publicity isn't good publicity. As a New York publicist put it: "What: the guy's an asshole so I'll go and buy his novel?" View quote
Martin Amis
Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything. View quote
Martin Amis
He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed. View quote
Martin Amis
The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life. View quote
Martin Amis
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone. View quote
Martin Amis
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. View quote
Martin Amis
My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived. View quote
Martin Amis
Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside... View quote
Martin Amis
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change. (Martin Amis)
When you've lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour. View quote
Martin Amis
Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life. View quote
Martin Amis
Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road. View quote
Martin Amis
Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money. View quote
Martin Amis
Exploitative is the key word here. It suggests that while you are free to be as sexually miserable as you like, the moment you exchange hard cash for a copy of Playboy, you are in the pornography perpetuation business, and your misery becomes political. The truth is that pornography is just a sad affair all around. It is there because men in their hundreds of millions want it to be there. Killing pornography is like killing the messenger. The extent to which Larkin was "dependent" on pornography should be a measure our pity, or even our sympathy. But Motion hears the beep of his political pager, and he stands to attention. View quote
Martin Amis
It occurs to you that Ulysses is about cliché. It is about inherited, ready-made formulations - most notably Irish Catholicism and anti-Semitism. After all, prejudices are clichés: they are secondhand hatreds... Joyce never uses a cliché in innocence. View quote
Martin Amis
Our best destiny, as planetary cohabitants, is the development of what has been called "species consciousness" - something over and above nationalisms, blocs, religions, ethnicities. During this week of incredulous misery, I have been trying to apply such a consciousness, and such a sensibility. Thinking of the victims, the perpetrators, and the near future, I felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear. View quote
Martin Amis
[I am] secular to the bones, but not an atheist. View quote
Martin Amis
We accept that there are legitimate casus belli: acts or situations "provoking or justifying war". The present debate feels off-centre, and faintly unreal, because the US and the UK are going to war for a new set of reasons (partly undisclosed) while continuing to adduce the old set of reasons (which in this case do not cohere or even overlap). View quote
Martin Amis
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. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity. (Martin Amis)
She was sitting there beside the bookcase, trying to read, in a growing panic of self-consciousness. Why? Because reading presupposed a future. View quote
Martin Amis
One wonders how the literary revisionists and canon cleansers can bear to take the money. Imagine a school of sixteenth century art criticism that spent its time contently jeering at the past for not knowing about perspective. View quote
Martin Amis
Not greatly gifted, not deeply beautiful, Madonna tells America that fame comes from wanting it badly enough. And everyone is terribly good at badly wanting things. View quote
Martin Amis
The doltish euphemism of conglomerate America. View quote
Martin Amis