MARTIN AMIS QUOTES
English novelist (1949- )
You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks.
MARTIN AMIS
"Martin Amis Contemplates Evil", Smithsonian Magazine, Sep. 2012
Every day, the dispensing of existence.... Its face is fierce and distant and ancient.
MARTIN AMIS
Time's Arrow
We all have names we don't know about.
MARTIN AMIS
The Information
Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
MARTIN AMIS
London Fields
What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything.
MARTIN AMIS
"Failures of Tolerance", Experience
Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. 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
"The Voice of the Lonely Crowd", The Guardian, Jun. 1, 2002
Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
MARTIN AMIS
The Sunday Times, Mar. 17, 1996
But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.
MARTIN AMIS
Experience
While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw--that of outright unreadability.
MARTIN AMIS
The War Against Cliche
In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
MARTIN AMIS
"Gore Vidal", The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
MARTIN AMIS
Time's Arrow
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
"Martin Amis Contemplates Evil", Smithsonian Magazine, Sep. 2012
I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.
MARTIN AMIS
interview, The Paris Review, spring 1998
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. We can't tell if it will survive us. But we can be sure that it's the last thing to go.
MARTIN AMIS
The Second Plane
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
Other People
My life looked good on paper -- where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
MARTIN AMIS
Experience
Meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.
MARTIN AMIS
London Fields
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
lecture at Harvard University, Jan. 30, 1997
It's interesting when you're doing signing sessions with other writers and you look at the queues at each table and you can see definite human types gathering there.... My queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags and people who stare at me very intensely, as if I have some particular message for them. As if I must know that they've been reading me, that this dyad or symbiosis of reader and writer has been so intense that I must somehow know about it.
MARTIN AMIS
interview, The Paris Review, spring 1998
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.
MARTIN AMIS
Time's Arrow