The Rub of Time Quotes

“America is sick about health: America, where strokes and heart attacks come with a price tag, and where the doctors carry on like slum landlords or war profiteers. And Americans admire it—this triage of the wallet.”
― Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017

“Patent attorney Greg Raymer is no drink of water, but there is a woman in his autograph queue (“My husband’s a great fan. You’ve inspired him, big-time”) who has munched herself into a wheelchair: arms like legs, legs like torsos, and a torso like an exhausted orgy.”
― Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1986-2016

“There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics [notably the lower clergy] for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history. Guardian 2009”
― Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1994-2016

“Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown.”
― Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017

“When we enter the arctic labyrinth known as Late James, the retreat from the reader, the embrace of introversion, is as emphatic as that of Joyce, and far more fiendishly prolonged.”
― Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017

“Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. a beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.”
― Martin Amis, The Rub of Time

“barrios; each barrio has two or three gangs, and all the gangs are theoretically”
― Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1994-2016

“The inspiration for a particular novel can be a phrase, a sentence, an image, a situation. But novelists aren’t poets. They are grinders. What sends me up to my study is a feeling in the back of the throat—like the desire for my first cigarette. Writing is a far more physical process than is generally believed. Half the time you seem to be mutely and helplessly obeying your body.”
― Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017

“John Updike once argued that although fiction can withstand any amount of egocentricity, it is wholly allergic to narcissism.”
― Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017

“Unlike the poet, the novelist (see Auden’s lustrous sonnet of that name) assumes that his or her reactions to the main events (in life, in history) are utterly median, average—predictably and dependably human.”
― Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017

“Aged seventy-three, he had just finished a book on the King’s English; and now English was a language the King no longer had. His fate was a brutal reminder. We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains.”
― Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017