The Information Quotes

“He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“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

“Some junk novels were all about airports. Some junk novels were even called things like Airport. Why, then you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? …Junk novels have been around for at least as long as non-junk novels, and airports haven’t been around for very long at all. But they both really took off at the same time. Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“Richard didn't mind Gwyn being rich...Having always been poor was good preparation for being rich. Better than having always been rich...The well and all its sweet water would surely one day run dry.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“Being photographed was dead time for the soul. Can the head think, while it does the same half smile under the same light frown? If this was all true, then Richard's soul was in great shape. No one photographed him any more, not even his wife. When the photographs came back from an increasingly infrequent holiday. Richard was never there..an elbow or earlobe on the edge of the frame, on the edge of life and love..”
― Martin Amis , The Information

“there in the night their bed had the towelly smell of marriage.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“It must make you feel nice and young to say that being a man means nothing and being a woman means nothing and what matters is being a...person. How about being a spider, Gwyn. Let's imagine you're a spider. You're a spider, and you've just had your first serious date. You're limping away from that now, and you're looking over your shoulder, and there's your girlfriend, eating one of your legs like a chicken drumstick. What would you say? I know. You'd say: I find I never think in terms of male spiders or in terms of female spiders. I find I always think in terms of...spiders”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“You couldn't catch a yawn from someone you didn't like.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“And what was astrology? Astrology was the consecration of the homocentric universe. Astrology went further than saying that the stars were all about us. Astrology said that the stars were all about me.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“These days he smoked and drank largely to solace himself for what drinking and smoking had done to him, so he drank and smoked a lot. He experimented, furthermore, with pretty well any other drug he could get his hands on,”
― Martin Amis (Author), The Information

“The criminal resembles the artist in his pretension, his incompetence, and his self-pity.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“Perché piangono gli uomini? Per colpa delle lotte e delle gesta e della maratona delle promozioni, perché vogliono la mamma, perché restano ciechi anche col passar del tempo, per colpa di tutte le erezioni che debbono inventarsi sul più bello dal nulla, per colpa di tutto ciò che hanno fatto. Perché non possono più essere felici o tristi – solo sbronzi o pazzi. E perché non sanno che pesci pigliare quando sono svegli.
E poi c'è l'informazione, che arriva di notte.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“On his way back through the plane Richard had seen women crying-- three women, four women. And he realized that there always were these women on planes, crying, with makeup in meltdown, folded over in the window seat or candidly hideous in the aisle, clutching Kleenex. Before, if he assumed anything, he assumed they were crying about boyfriends or husbands (partings or sunderings), or crying (who cared?) from toothache or curse pains or fear of flying. But now he was forty, and he knew.

Women on planes were crying because someone they love or loved is dead or dying. Every plane has them.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“He was in a terrible state - that of consciousness.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“Literature...describes a descent. First, gods. Then demigods. Then epic became tragedy: failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class and its mercantile dreams. Then it was about you--Gina, Gilda: social realism. Then it was about them: lowlife. Villains. The ironic age...Literature, for a while, can be about us...:about writers. But that won't last long. How do we burst clear of all this? And he asked them: Whither the novel? ... Supposing...that the progress of literature (downward) was forced in that direction by the progress of cosmology (upward--up, up). For human beings, the history of cosmology is the history of increasing humiliation. Always hysterically but less and less fiercely resisted, as one illusion after another fell away.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to the culture of the waiting room. Piped music, the language of calming suasion. Come this way--yes, the flight attendant will see you now. Airports, junk novels: they were taking your mind off mortal fear.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“Demi's linguistic quirk is essentially and definingly female. It just is. Drawing in breath to denounce this proposition, women will often come out with something like, "Up you!" or "Ballshit!" For I am referring to Demi's use of the conflated or mangled catchphrase--Demi's speech-bargains: she wanted two for the price of one. The result was expressive, and you usually knew what she meant, given the context.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves. And hair, and skin: dead cells. This ancient detritus was nonetheless one move ahead of you, making its humorless own arrangements to rejoin the cosmos.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“The sun was looking down on this, but not quite sincerely.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“Girls, in those days, couldn't do anything to you (they couldn't call the lawyers, the tabloids, the cops) except kill themselves or get pregnant. All they had was life: they could augment it, they could bear it away. They could subtract from it or they could add to it; and that was all.”
― Martin Amis, The Information