English novelist (1949- )
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 your 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 man and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams."
MARTIN AMIS
The Information
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable.
MARTIN AMIS
Other People
The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.
MARTIN AMIS
"Claus von Bulow", The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America
In her final months [Princess] Diana was being shat upon by the tabloids -- basically for sleeping with an Arab. When she died, these same papers were astonished by the millennial wave of emotionalism that swept the country ... [One paper] had a print-ready story about what a slag the Princess was, and they had to pull it at the last moment. It was replaced with an image of Diana as an angel, ascending to heaven.
MARTIN AMIS
The Guardian, Feb. 22, 2014
What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.
MARTIN AMIS
"Introduction: Thinkability", Einstein's Monsters
The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)
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The Information
You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full contact -- all that?
MARTIN AMIS
London Fields
You use a different part of your heart with girls.
MARTIN AMIS
The Guardian, Feb. 22, 2014
Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.
MARTIN AMIS
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
When you've lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
MARTIN AMIS
House of Meetings
Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do -- like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.
MARTIN AMIS
interview, Washington Post, Nov. 7, 2003
Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief.
MARTIN AMIS
The Rachel Papers
The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.
MARTIN AMIS
Experience
Seeing the world anew, as if it were new, is as old as writing. It's what all painters are trying to do, to see what's there, to see it in a way that renews it. It becomes more and more urgent as the planet gets worn flat and forest after forest is slain to print the paper for people's impressions to be scrawled down on. It becomes harder and harder to be original, to see things with an innocent eye. Innocence is much tied up with it. As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to see it.
MARTIN AMIS
interview, The Paris Review, spring 1998
I had my yob periods. Nothing violent but certainly loutish. I think it's frustrated intelligence. Imagine that if you were really intelligent and everyone treated you as though you were stupid and no one tried to teach you anything -- the sort of deep subliminal rage that would get going in you. But then once it gets going, you make a strength out of what you know is your weakness, which is that you are undeveloped.
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"Martin Amis Contemplates Evil", Smithsonian Magazine, Sep. 2012
Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
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"Introduction: Thinkability", Einstein's Monsters
Look at the eyes now -- the eyes of an Old Believer. Part of his mind was away somewhere, dancing with itself.
MARTIN AMIS
House of Meetings
Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth ... is that nobody gets over anything.
MARTIN AMIS
House of Meetings
Well, my father [Kingsley Amis] was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it was good that I began when I was young and bold and foolish, otherwise I'd have become too self-conscious and aware of the weight of not having written anything yet.
MARTIN AMIS
"The Past Gets Bigger and the Future Shrinks", Los Angeles Review of Books, Jul. 21, 2013
The press is more vicious than the populace.... It's hard to disentangle what was present in the national psyche to begin with, and what was added. It does seem peculiarly British to want to destroy eminence -- though often it's an unearned eminence, more plain ubiquity -- and once the boot has been applied, there's a huge queue of people wanting to do the same.
MARTIN AMIS
The Guardian, Feb. 22, 2014