Martin Amis > Quotes

“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

“And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.”
― Martin Amis, London Fields

“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

“When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable”
― Martin Amis, Other People

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“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

“When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“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

“When a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, “above all others,” you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“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

“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

“I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)”
― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

“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

“Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .”
― Martin Amis, London Fields

“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

“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

“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

“My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.”
― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

“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

“Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.”
― Martin Amis

“Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.”
― Martin Amis

“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 Second Plane: 14 Responses to September 11

“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

“He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.”
― 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

“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

“Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.”
― Martin Amis

“They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.”
― Martin Amis, Time's Arrow

“The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority... the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“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

“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

“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

“You know, I wouldn’t have done this a month ago. I wouldn’t have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now I’m just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They have to go ahead and happen. You watch – you wait… Things still happen here and something is waiting to happen to me. I can tell. Recently my life feels like a bloodcurdling joke. Recently my life has taken on *form* Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting – any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.”
― Martin Amis

“So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me. ”
― 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

“You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?”
― Martin Amis, London Fields

“They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life”
― Martin Amis, Essays

“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.”
― Martin Amis, London Fields

“I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: 'Well. Shakespeare looked like shit.' It works wonders.”
― Martin Amis, Money

“[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers