Martin Amis Quotes

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

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

Belief is otiose reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

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

It’s possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Grea...

It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he ...

Marriage is always something of a compromise, as I'm sure you're now aware. Any long-term relationsh...

Impartially, shrewdly, I considered suicide, though not in my worst moments. The bottle of pills. Th...

Why couldn't Rachel be a little more specific about the type of person she was? Goodness knew; if sh...

He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by the g...

He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.

Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the...

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness.

It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think t...

You never can tell, though, with suicide notes, can you? In the planetary aggregate of all life, the...

I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror...

I peer through the spectral, polluted, nicotine-sodden windows of my sock at these old lollopers in ...

Oh man sometimes I wake up feel like a cat runover.Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard...

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much hu...

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look a...

…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the...

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, a...

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bare to get that way. You must have seen it com...

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class...

Now I have to lie on the bed for a few minutes and let the solitude gather round me once more.

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

You know, I wouldn’t have done this a month ago. I wouldn’t have done it then. Then I was avoiding. ...

A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a...

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from ...

Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It’s not i...

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went ...

The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you atten...

Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic m...

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.