English novelist (1949- )
He was in a terrible state -- that of consciousness.
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The Information
Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life.
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Essays
The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists -- haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations.
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"The Voice of the Lonely Crowd", The Guardian, Jun. 1, 2002
The trouble with life ... is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending.
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introduction, Experience
Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.
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Money: A Suicide Note
Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.
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Time's Arrow
The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.
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"Introduction: Thinkability", Einstein's Monsters
I can imagine in a century or two that rule by women will be seen as a better bet than rule by men. What's wrong with men is that they tend to look for the violent solution. Women don't.
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"Martin Amis Contemplates Evil", Smithsonian Magazine, Sep. 2012
Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.
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interview, The Paris Review, spring 1998
September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.
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"The Voice of the Lonely Crowd", The Guardian, Jun. 1, 2002
How incredibly avaricious the whole operation was, the way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half price for children.... It was a kind of exploration of evil. Just how bad can we get?
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"Martin Amis Contemplates Evil", Smithsonian Magazine, Sep. 2012
In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes -- homosexuality, sexual disease, and death -- about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.
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"Making Sense of AIDS", The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America
Suicide is what everyone young thinks they'll do before they get old. But they hardly ever get round to it. They just don't want to commit themselves in that way. When you're young and you look ahead, time ends in mist at twenty-five. "Old won't happen to me", you say. But old does. Oh, old does. Old always gets you in the end.
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Other People
Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.
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House of Meetings
It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.
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"Phantom of the Opera: The Republicans in 1988", Visiting Mr. Nabokov and Other Excursions
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.
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attributed, Novelists in Interview
You want readers; you love the reader. A great part of writing is hoping to make things as nice as possible for the reader -- be a good host, have them put their feet up by the fire, pull up a chair, get out a good wine. The writer who loves the reader always feels that; Nabokov would always give you his best chair. But there have been one or two writers who didn't give a shit about the reader, like Joyce -- partly because he had patronage, he didn't need the reader to earn a living. And Henry James, who went off the reader in a huge way, which is why those last few novels became impenetrable. If you look at early James, he's almost middlebrow, then you get The Ambassadors, this incredibly convoluted thing. Joyce and James became bad hosts: If you wandered into their house you wouldn't be welcomed. You'd stagger around while they were in the kitchen making some vile concoction which might amuse you, but it would taste disgusting and eccentric.
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"The Past Gets Bigger and the Future Shrinks", Los Angeles Review of Books, Jul. 21, 2013
When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a long time before you can really say you're a writer. You've got to stand the test of time, which is the only real test there is.
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"The Past Gets Bigger and the Future Shrinks", Los Angeles Review of Books, Jul. 21, 2013
Has it ever happened to you...? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you're going to remember that moment for the rest of your life.
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House of Meetings
Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.
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"Phantom of the Opera: The Republicans in 1988", Visiting Mr. Nabokov and Other Excursions