"And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit."
— Martin Amis (London Fields)

"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)

"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."
— Martin Amis (Money: A Suicide Note)

""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." "
— Martin Amis (Experience: A Memoir)

"Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"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: 14 Responses to September 11)

"We all have names we don't know about."
— Martin Amis

"He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed."
— Martin Amis

"It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth."
— Martin Amis

"He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness."
— 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."
— Martin Amis

"There is a Western phenomenon called the male midlife crisis. Very often it is heralded by divorce. What history might have done to you, you bring about on purpose: separation from woman and child. Don’t tell me that such men aren’t tasting the ancient flavors of death and defeat.

In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary. He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.

Over here, now, there’s no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death.
"
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"In a sense Lolita is too great for its own good. It rushes up on the reader like a recreational drug more powerful than any yet discovered or devised. In common with its narrator, it is both irresistible and unforgivable. And yet it all works out. I shall point the way to what I take to be its livid and juddering heart - which is itself in prethrombotic turmoil, all heaves and lifts and thrills (vii)."
— 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."
— Martin Amis (Money)

"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 (The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America)

"I gestured at my litre of fizzy red wine. “Want a drop of this?” I asked him.
“No thanks. I try not to drink at lunchtime.”
“So do I. But I never quite make it.”
“I feel like shit all day if I drink at lunchtime.”
“Me too. But I feel like shit all lunchtime if I don’t.”
“Yes, well it all comes down to choices, doesn’t it?” he said. “It’s the same in the evenings. Do you want to feel good at night or do you want to feel good in the morning? It’s the same with life. Do you want to feel good young or do you want to feel good old? One or the other, not both.”
“Isn’t it a tragedy?”"
— Martin Amis (Money)

"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 (The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America)

"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."
— Martin Amis (Money)

"The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else."
— Martin Amis (Experience: A Memoir)

"The only writer who gives me unfeigned pleasure is P.G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bit heavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown over Sunset at Blandings."
— Martin Amis (London Fields)

"Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is...to impress your personality on the road."
— Martin Amis

"...with the flat smile of the deeply inconvenienced."
— Martin Amis

"The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do--like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy."
— 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."
— Martin Amis

"As I've already mentioned, 1984 and I were getting on famously. A no-frills setup, run without sentiment, snobbery or cultural favouritism, Airstrip One seemed like my kind of town. (I saw myself as an idealistic young corporal in the Thought Police.)"
— Martin Amis (Money)

"Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions."
— Martin Amis

"You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal"
— Martin Amis (Money)

"when the sky is as grey as this - impeccably grey, a denial, really of the very concept of colour - and the stooped millions lift their heads, it's hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more then the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes."
— Martin Amis (Money)

"Are snoopers snooping on their own pain? Probably."
— Martin Amis

"Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find."
— Martin Amis

"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)

"He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged."
— Martin Amis

"Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit."
— Martin Amis

"You are as well prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital; and your skin is a beautiful color. Look at you – look at the burnish of you."
— Martin Amis

"Little did they know that the place they were about to burgle -- the shop, and the flat above it -- had already been burgled the week before: yes, and the week before that. And the week before that. It was all burgled out. Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, was clearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that almost everywhere had been burgled. Burglars were forever bumping into one another, stepping on the toes of other burglars. There were burglar jams on rooftops and stairways, on groaning fire-escapes. Burglars were being burgled by fellow burglars, and were doing the same thing back. Burgled goods jigged from flat to flat. Returning from burgling, burglars would discover that they themselves had just been burgled, sometimes by the very burglar that they themselves had just burgled! How would this crisis in burgling be resolved? It would be resolved when enough burglars found burgling a waste of time, and stopped doing it. Then, for a while, burgling would become worth doing again. But burglars had plenty of time to waste -- it was all they had plenty of, and there was nothing else to do with it -- so they just went on burgling."
— Martin Amis

"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.""
— Martin Amis (The Information)

"For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing – from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"I’m sitting in the prow-shaped dining room of a tourist steamer, the Georgi Zhukov, on the Yenisei River, which flows from the foothills of Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, thus cleaving the northern Eurasian plain – a distance of some two and a half thousand versts. Given Russian distances, and the general arduousness of Russian life, you’d expect a verst to be the equivalent of – I don’t know – thirty-nine miles. In fact it’s barely more than a kilometer."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"In freedom, every non-nomenklatura citizen knew perpetual hunger – the involuntary slurp and gulp of the esophagus. In camp, your hunger kicked as I imagine a fetus would kick. It was the same with boredom. And boredom, by now, has lost all its associations with mere lassitude and vapidity. Boredom is no longer the absence of emotion; it is itself an emotion, and a violent one. A silent tantrum of boredom."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"In the last months of the war, when I raped in uniform – we were, by then, so full of death (and the destruction of everything we had and knew) that the act of love, even in travesty, felt like a spell against the riot of murder."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Once, as he inhaled with his customary vehemence, I had a thought that made my armpits come alive."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Oppression lays down blood-lust. It lays it down like a wine."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Twenty-two poems covered the period from Lev’s first serious efforts to his arrest in 1948 at the age of nineteen. Very Mandelstamian, I adjudged: well-made, and studiously conversational, and coming close, here and there, to the images that really hurt and connect."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Venus, I’m sorry that you’ve gone on minding that I didn’t let you drive me to O’Hare. “That’s what we do,” you said: “We drive each other to and from the airport.” Do you realize how rare that is? No one does it anymore, not even newlyweds. All right – it was selfish of me to decline. I said it was because I didn’t want to say goodbye to you in a public place. But I think it was the asymmetry of it that was really troubling me. You and I, we drive each other to and from the airport. And I didn’t want a to when I knew there wouldn’t be a from."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)