Quotes from Martin Amis

But you've got to do it in the end. You have to end up with somebody. Because otherwise you go mad, or you start worrying about going mad, which is even worse. You can't go on sleeping alone.

Patent attorney Greg Raymer is no drink of water, but there is a woman in his autograph queue ("My husband's a great fan. You've inspired him, big-time") who has munched herself into a wheelchair: arms like legs, legs like torsos, and a torso like an exhausted orgy.

El amor me resulta difícil. Y al amor yo le resulto difícil.

Let me give you a lesson on war, Golo. Rule number one: never invade Russia.

What was Richard? He was a revenger, in what was probably intended to be a comedy.

Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.

In the end, it's not your Nobel Prize you're thinking of, it's not your three National Book Awards, and all that. It's your sins of the heart (real or imagined), it's your wives, your children, and how things went with them.

Left alone in an interrogation room, some men will look as though they're well into their last ten seconds before throwing up. And they'll look that way for hours. They sweat like they just climbed out of the swimming pool. They eat and swallow air. I mean these guys are really going through it. You come and tip a light in their face. And they're bugeyed - the orbs both big and red, and faceted also. Little raised soft-cornered squares, wired with rust. These are the innocent.

I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bear to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there's nothing for you here.

I was once asked: 'Are you an Islamophobe?' And the answer is no. What I am is an Islamismophobe, or better say an anti-Islamist, because a phobia is an irrational fear, and it is not irrational to fear something that says it wants to kill you.

All rooms are waiting rooms. Your room is a waiting room. You are waiting, I am waiting. Everything is getting nearer to being over.

Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.

You shun your spirit,' he murmured, 'every time you agree to sell your days to the city, to measure out your life at the city's pace.

I will now take the chance to repeat my contention that the drama is handily inferior to the novel and the poem. Dramatists who have lasted more than a century include Shakespeare and – who else? One is soon reaching for a sepulchral Norwegian. Compare that to English poetry and its great waves of immortality. I agree that it is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright. I scream with laughter about it all the time. This is one of God's best jokes.

If we all downed tools and joined hands for ten minutes and stopped believing in money, then money would no longer exist. We never will, of course. Maybe money is the great conspiracy, the great fiction. The great addiction too: we're all addicted and we can't break the habit now. There's not even anything very twentieth century about it, except the disposition. You just can't kick it, that junk, even if you want to. You can't get the money monkey off your back.

It's a funny language, German. For one thing, everybody shouts it.

Suffering doesn't concern itself with the scale of other sufferings. It has no community sense. It isn't relative, is it.

Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won't get there so quick, not by natural means. You buy your ticket and you climb on board. That ticket costs everything you have. But it's just a one-way. This train takes you into the night, and leaves you there. It's the night train. Now

Suicide is a mind-body problem that ends violently and without any winner. I

America is sick about health: America, where strokes and heart attacks come with a price tag, and where the doctors carry on like slum landlords or war profiteers. And Americans admire it—this triage of the wallet.

In the solitude of my cell I have come to the bitter realisation that I have sinned gravely against humanity.

Happiness writes white: it doesn't show up on the page.

The driver treated his cab as a peasant might treat his horse or ass, with numb and proprietorial cruelty. The bursts of acceleration were like long-toothed, lip-flapping exhalations; then came the looping whinny of the brakes.

on daytime drinking] 'Yes, well it all comes down to choices, doesn't it?' he said. 'It's the same in the evenings. Do you want to feel good at night or do you want to feel good in the morning? It's the same with life. Do you want to feel good young or do you want to feel good old? One or the other, not both.