Martin Amis

Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there.…

— Martin Amis

Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the disposable diaper - is…

— Martin Amis

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and…

— Martin Amis

America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken…

— Martin Amis

“And what was astrology? Astrology was the consecration of the homocentric universe. Astrology went further than saying that the stars were all…

— Martin Amis

...So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answered…

— Martin Amis

When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of…

— Martin Amis

“What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they,…

— Martin Amis

“It must make you feel nice and young to say that being a man means nothing and being a woman means nothing…

— Martin Amis

“And while Trish stared - stared, as it now seemed, into her own eyes - Guy held her hand and watched the…

— Martin Amis

I think Jorge Borges said that when Argentineans die they turn into angels and go and live in Uruguay. But for the…

— Martin Amis

“So I am nineteen years old and don’t usually know what I’m doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get…

— Martin Amis

“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental…

— Martin Amis

In Germany, they were very interested in talking about their past. I respect that, and I think they've done quite well. It's…

— Martin Amis

“Take a look at the scaly witches round your local shopping center, many of them with children. Grim enough with their clothes…

— Martin Amis

America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants,…

— Martin Amis

There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack.…

— Martin Amis

The trouble with life is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The…

— Martin Amis

“Mary wanted to get out of here and on to another plane of life; but these words weren't going to help her…

— Martin Amis

Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too,…

— Martin Amis

Amis is acutely, vibrantly sensitive to the different registers of laughter. He knows that it can be the most affirming and uniquely…

— Martin Amis

I would say I'm an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just…

— Martin Amis

“As I now see it, America had no business involving itself in a series of distant convulsions where the ideas, variously interpreted,…

— Martin Amis

“Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid,…

— Martin Amis

It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other…

— Martin Amis

“Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to…

— Martin Amis

“And there was something that frightened me much more. If I went to the doctor's tomorrow, and was cured by, say, the…

— Martin Amis

“What saddened and incensed her was the abdication of power, so craven, the surrender so close to home. And power was what…

— Martin Amis

“There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics [notably the lower…

— Martin Amis

“Imagine the terrestrial timespan as an outstretched arm: a single swipe of an emery-board, across the nail of the third finger, erases…

— Martin Amis

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment.…

— Martin Amis

What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for…

— Martin Amis

No-one is going to sit down and read Bleak House to the family any more, but they can all huddle up happily…

— Martin Amis