Quotes from Martin Amis

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

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

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.

Suicide, like Aspirin, like everything else, costs money. And I didn't have any. Unless you're really brave, suicide is always gonna set you back a couple of bob

La città - è la città che dovrà guarirli, con lame di coltello e automobili, manganelli, colpi d'arma da fuoco. I cavi allentati e le pericolose costruzioni in muratura della città telecinetica.

Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.

After many ponderous experiments the first crematorium was opened in December 1920 in Petrograd. It could manage barely 120 bodies a month, and, in February 1921, cremated itself when the wooden roof caught fire.

If you want a couple of weeks in bed (as I did, bi-annually), and if you have indolent and credulous parents, it's amazing what a few packs of French cigarettes will do.

Well, we cry and twist and are naked at both ends of life. We cry at both ends of life, while the doctor watches.

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

The criminal resembles the artist in his pretension, his incompetence, and his self-pity.

Films are all luck and anarchy.

Love finds me difficult.

Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to the culture of the waiting room. Piped music, the language of calming suasion. Come this way--yes, the flight attendant will see you now. Airports, junk novels: they were taking your mind off mortal fear.

And Keith felt it again (he felt it several times a day): the tingle of license. Everyone could swear now, if they wanted to. The word *fuck* was available to both sexes. It was like a sticky toy, and it was there if you wanted it.

We're nowhere near young enough for the present war, but when the world war comes—we'll be just right to fight it. We are, after all, a superb physical specimen. Our feet aren't flat. Our vision is clear. We're not clubfooted or Marxist or nuts. We have no conscientious objections or anything of that kind. We're perfect.

What could never be endured, it turned out, was the last swathe of time before sleep came, the path from larger day to huger night, a little death when the mind was still alive and fluttering. Thus

I try to like the way the world is changing, but there seems to be no extra room for me inside.

The world is boiling. You hardly dare open a paper these days: the news is all of cataclysm and collapse. Tempers are threadbare; the yobs are winning; everybody accepts the fact that they've got to get nastier in order to survive. The world is going bad on us. I'm having nothing to do with it.

Everybody dreams about being harmed. It's easy. Much tougher to recover from the dream of harming…

Kingsley used to tell the following anecdote about sibling rivalry – how he found me, when I was four or five, lying on the stairs in an ecstasy of grief, how he worriedly knelt at my side and, after several minutes, managed to quell my hiccuppy gaspings, my heaving chest. Then he said, 'Easy now . . . What is it?' When at last I could find and shape the words, I said, 'Philip had a biscuit' . . .

barrios; each barrio has two or three gangs, and all the gangs are theoretically

Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a heaven in Hell's despair.

When we enter the arctic labyrinth known as Late James, the retreat from the reader, the embrace of introversion, is as emphatic as that of Joyce, and far more fiendishly prolonged.