Inside Story Quotes

“In the end, it's not your Nobel Prize you're thinking of, it's not your three National Book Awards, and all that. It's your sins of the heart (real or imagined), it's your wives, your children, and how things went with them.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“Tell a dream, lose a reader’ is a dictum usually attributed to Henry James (though I and others have failed to track it down). Dreams are all right as long as they exhaust themselves in about half a sentence; once they’re allowed to get going, and once the details start piling up, then dreams become recipes either for stodge or for very thin gruel. Why is this? Any dream that lasts a paragraph, let alone a page, is already closing in on another very solid proscription, Nothing odd will do long (Samuel Johnson). But it’s even more basic than that. Dreams are too individualised. We all dream, but dreams are not part of our shared experience.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“Once, at the Fat Maggot, the young couple were hurriedly and alarmingly joined by Phoebe’s parents. ‘They’re shopping in town and I asked them along. And by the way,’ said Phoebe, looking at her watch, ‘he likes to be called Sir Graeme.’ ‘Why? For fun?’ ‘No, it’s inherited. So it’s Lady Phelps too, but you can just call Dallen Dallen.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“What’s the first reason? Or are the tits the first reason and the arse the second?’ ‘No. The tits plus the arse are the first reason. The second reason’s this. I eat like a pig and never gain an ounce…Okay.’ At this point she had nothing on but her skirt and her shoes, which she now kicked off. As she raised the top sheet she consulted the (digital) bedside clock, and said, ‘No more talking. It’s five forty-five and the table’s booked for nine…Oh yes. Here’s another uh, surprising protuberance. Give me your hand.’ A moment passed. ‘Gawd,’ he said (it was originally gaw, with the d added to seem less juvenile). ‘It’s like a – a fist in a mink mitten.’ ‘…Thanks again, Martin. Another improvement. Most men just notice how it sticks out and then say something impossibly vulgar about how gooey it soon gets.’ He said, ‘…It’s your boner.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“differently, because it claims, at least, to have universal application. In fact, the main monotheisms explore a dully partial view of the cosmos, whatever the sect or sub-sect. Greene’s faction was Roman Catholicism. So he might have commanded a plurality in fifteenth-century Europe. But not now: in an intellectual age that has grown used to quasars, singularities, and curved spacetime, Greene’s novels are still inviting us to gape at the burning bush. We have been begging a question – a big question and a very pertinent question. How can an autobiographical novel possibly attempt, let alone achieve, the universal (though Saul found a way)? But let’s go on begging it for now.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“The collective failure is complete – and truly abysmal. Dreams are a spume that dances on the surface of a troubled pond or puddle; but sex is oceanic, and covers seven-tenths of the globe. A force so fundamental, so varied, so grand, so rich. And yet its evocation on the page is somehow beyond us. Writers will just have to grin and bear it, and look for comfort where they may. Well, I suppose it magnifies our respect for the act, the act that peoples the world. It does do that. We can bow with honour to what is ineffable, and follow Dickens to the door. But why can’t we describe it? What makes our hands loth and cold?”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“allowed to get going, and once the details start piling up, then dreams become recipes either for stodge or for very thin gruel. Why is this? Any dream that lasts a paragraph, let alone a page, is already closing in on another very solid proscription, Nothing odd will do long (Samuel Johnson). But it’s even more basic than that. Dreams are too individualised.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“Oh, on the stranger-than-fiction front…Actually nothing is stranger than fiction. You may well have ‘troubling dreams’, these days, but you’re not going to wake up ‘transformed into a gigantic insect’. And such lines as no writer could invent a character more outlandish than our would-be president and our would-be president has made satire redundant are almost touchingly naive. One thing literature can do, and has always done and will always go on doing (with no particular exertion), is conjure up characters stranger than Trump. As for satire: while turning him into art, would Swift, Pope, Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, or Don DeLillo, say, feel that there was nothing to add?”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“The Nobel Prize, first awarded in 1901, gives us a useful index. Twenty-two per cent of its recipients are Jewish; and Jews comprise just 2 per cent of the world population. *11 ‘An illiterate, underbred book…”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“The capital P has no bearing on the PTSD of Israel. The dread of extinction is the white noise the people continuously try to ignore – continuously, because the dread of extinction is punctually refreshed. Following the Holocaust, within three years of the Holocaust, what starts to happen? Independence Day was proclaimed on May 15, 1948, and on May 16, 1948, five Arab armies launched what was avowedly a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of annihilation (its failure was the original Arab nakba – ‘catastrophe’). The same applied in June 1967 (the Six Day War) and in October 1973 (the Yom Kippur War)…In January 1991 the existential threat came from Saddam Hussein; during the first Gulf War, Tel Aviv was bombarded by Iraqi missiles, and Israeli families sat in sealed rooms with German-made gas masks covering their faces. In March 2002, with the Second Intifada, the threat came from the Palestinians. Now the threat comes from Gaza, and from the overarching prospect of nuclear weapons in Iran… To understate the obvious, this is not a formula for radiant mental health. And if there’s a scintilla of truth in the notion that countries are like people, then it is vain to expect Israel to behave normatively or even rationally. The question is not, How can you expect it, after all that? The question is, After all that, why do you expect it?”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“As we know and have always known, there is in this country a vast and inveterate minority (about 35 per cent) whose sympathies lie not with the silently studious protestors, in Greensboro, but with the rejectionists yelling in their ears and pouring sodas on their heads and then beating them to the ground; not with six-year-old Ruby Bridges, in New Orleans, but with the hate-warped face of the housewife in the picket line brandishing a black doll in a toy coffin. …Is”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“In the days leading up to the passage of Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act of 2010), I listened on the radio to ‘a town hall’. ‘I happen to be an American,’ said a woman in the audience, her voice yodelling and hiccuping with emotion, ‘and I don’t want to live in a country like the Soviet Union!’ Or, she might have said, a country (at last) beginning (at least) to emulate Canada, Australia, and all the constituent states of the EU. But in the US saying ‘like Europe’, or ‘like England’, or ‘like France’, or ‘like Switzerland’, is the rough equivalent of saying ‘like the Soviet Union’ – which disappeared for ever in 1991.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“Stateside – and you learn all this by anecdote, atmosphere, and osmosis – adults of all ages imagine and anticipate illness or injury with a two-tier queasiness wholly unknown in Britain (and in all the other developed democracies except South Africa). On the question of healthcare, as on the question of guns, facts and figures lose their normal powers of suasion. It is no cause for embarrassment when the World Health Organization ranks America thirty-seventh in quality of service; and it may even be a point of pride that America comes a clear first, besting all rivals, in cost per capita.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“The hospital is the size of Houston, no, it actually is Houston, with its administrative centres, its gardens and malls, all the way out to the rest homes and recuperation dorms in its infinitely proliferating windblown suburbs.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“I suddenly remembered the most contemptuous word I had ever heard the old man utter. Discovering me lying in the bath with a cigarette, a book, and a perilously perched glass […], he almost barked, ‘What is this? Luxury?’ That this was another word for sin, drawn from the repertory of antique Calvinism, I immediately understood.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“suddenly remembered the most contemptuous word I had ever heard the old man utter. Discovering me lying in the bath with a cigarette, a book, and a perilously perched glass […], he almost barked, ‘What is this? Luxury?’ That this was another word for sin, drawn from the repertory of antique Calvinism, I immediately understood.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“It’s no use talking to you – you don’t care what girls’re like,’ he said, ‘as long as they’re girls. That’s dispositive. It settles it.’ ‘Hang on. I don’t fancy every girl. Though they’re nearly all fanciable once you get them to open up about themselves…There may be something in what you say. I just think, Let’s get started and see how it goes.’ ‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you. Because you’ve got no social conscience. That’s the difference between us. I’m of that higher breed – those “to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest”. Keats, Little Keith.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“There used to be a time, in sunset homes, when the old men and the old women were vigilantly kept apart (especially after dinner). Now that approach was considered old-fashioned. Why, these days, in sunset homes in Denmark, there were porno screenings every Saturday night, and assignations were cautiously encouraged. ‘With many frail elderly,’ the reporter allowed (echoing doctors’ concerns), there was ‘the risk of serious injury’; and ‘questions of consent’ could be complicated when one or both parties happened to be senile.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“Later in the morning they performed their first act of love in a week; and for him, as always, it was like the tearsoaked reunion which marks the end of a long romantic melodrama about the Second World War.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“Well, it means a chaotic state which no one has sufficient internal organisation to resist. A state in which one is overwhelmed by all kind of powers – political, technological, military, economic, and so on – which carry everything before them with a kind of heathen disorder in which we’re supposed to survive with all our human qualities.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“Early advice, or early commandments, can be pernicious. I love the short stories of Alice Munro; but someone must have told her, when she was little, to shun everyday contractions like ‘couldn’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’ and ‘hadn’t’ (for example, ‘[Enid had to tell Rupert] that she could not swim. And that would not be a lie…she had not learned to swim’). It makes for a choppy, counter-conversational forward flow. But in the end all those nots only amount to a flesh wound: bits of buckshot on the body of Munro’s prose…Whoever introduced Henry James to the joys of EV (see below) has systemic ills to answer for – among them gentility and evasiveness.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“No. Tocqueville said that humour would be bred out of them by sheer diversity. Anything witty was bound to offend someone. He thought they’d reach the point where nobody’d dare say anything at all.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“While we were moving from Camden Town, London, to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, there was much to do: and Elena did almost all of it. At the outset she made it clear that by far the greatest obstacle we would face -- the most time-consuming and labour-intensive, the most tediously labyrinthine, and the most extortionate -- had to do with American healthcare. One afternoon I gingerly looked into it; and after an hour or two I thought, Well at least there’ll be no ambiguity in our case: if any Amis gets so much as a headache or a nosebleed, it will be far simpler and thriftier for the four of us to fly first class to London, take a limousine each to the Savoy, and then, the next day, wander into one or another of the NHS.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“Death is an artist, not an intellectual.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story