Martin Amis
126 quotes
Biography
Sir Martin Louis Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter and critic. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989).
"Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn."
"Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn."
"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."
"And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit."
"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."
"My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived."
"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."
"I have strong moral views, and they are very much directed at things like money and acquisition. I think money is the central deformity in life, as Saul Bellow says, it's one of the evils that has cheerfully survived identification as an evil. 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 we have all agreed to go along with. My hatred for it does look as though I'm underwriting a certain asceticism, but it isn't really that way: I don't offer alternatives to what I deplore."
"Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions."
"Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal."
"Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture."
"It's been said that happiness writes white. It doesn't show up on the page. When you're on holiday and writing a letter home to a friend, no one wants a letter that says the food is good and the weather is charming and the accommodations comfortable. You want to hear about lost passports and rat-filled shacks."
"When you review an exhibition of paintings you don't compose a painting about it, when you review a film you don't make a film about it and when you review a new CD you don't make a little CD about it. But when you review a prose-narrative then you write a prose-narrative about that prose-narrative and those who write the secondary prose-narrative, let's face it, must have once had dreams of writing the primary prose-narrative. And so there is a kind of hierarchy of envy and all those other things."
"America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was."
"[I am] secular to the bones, but not an atheist."
"One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction. I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled."
"The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating."
"What is this televisual mastery of Reagan's? It is a celebration of good intentions and unexceptional abilities. His style is one of hammy self-effacement, a wry dismay at his own limited talents and their drastic elevation."
"In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong."
"Our vulgar delight in American vulgarity."
"When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life."
"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. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity."
"The doltish euphemism of conglomerate America."
"Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares — loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains."
"In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes — homosexuality, sexual disease, and death — about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them."