Quotes from Martin Amis

He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.

To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliche. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting cliches. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.

They claim there's a rationale for the children, don't they, sir? Yes. Those babes in arms will grow up and want revenge on the Nazis in about 1963. I suppose the rationale for the women under forty-five is that they might be pregnant. And the rationale for the older women is while we're at it.

Just as I was thinking that no century could possibly be dumber than the nineteenth, along comes the twentieth. I swear, the entire planet seemed to be staging some kind of stupidity contest.

No. Tocqueville said that humour would be bred out of them by sheer diversity. Anything witty was bound to offend someone. He thought they'd reach the point where nobody'd dare say anything at all.

His wife died from being too lower class. She wasn't up to it.

Most of his life was played out to a soundtrack of sadistic decibelage.

Unlike the poet, the novelist (see Auden's lustrous sonnet of that name) assumes that his or her reactions to the main events (in life, in history) are utterly median, average—predictably and dependably human.

Above, all was ocean brightness: against the flat blue sky the clouds had been sketched by an impressively swift and confident hand. What talent. I like the sky and often wonder where I'd be without it. I know: I'd be in England, where we don't have one.

John Updike once argued that although fiction can withstand any amount of egocentricity, it is wholly allergic to narcissism.

My theory is - we don't really go that far into people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and quickly ask if anybody's there.

I long to burst out of the world of money and into - into what? Into the world of thought and fascination.

The sun was looking down on this, but not quite sincerely.

Death is an artist, not an intellectual.

And still the handwritten letters keep coming, the words keep coming, the words a woman wants to hear. No dashed-off faxes from Trader. Faxes, which fade in six months, like contemporary love. No scrawled reminders propped against the toaster, such as I get from Tobe. And used to get from Deniss, from Jon, from Shawn, from Duwain. GET SOME TOILET PAPER FOR CHRIST SAKE. That wouldn't do for Jennifer. She got a fucking poem every other day.

Terror, perhaps, is always a confession of illegitimacy.

They are quite incapable of coming up with anything even remotely as terrible as what I do all day—and they've stopped trying. Now I just dream

When you become old ... When you become old, you find yourself auditioning for the role of a lifetime; then, after interminable rehearsals, you're finally starring in a horror film--a talentless, irresponsible, and above all low-budget horror film, in which (as is the way with horror films) they're saving the worst for last.

We kept nearly bumping into each other, unavoidably. I wished we could stop avoiding each other long enough to agree to avoid each other properly.

Al igual que la escritura, la pintura parece reflejar un mundo patas arriba en el que, por así decirlo, la flecha del tiempo discurre en sentido contrario. Las invisibles líneas de la velocidad hacen pensar en un nexo de secuencia y proceso muy diferente. De nuevo ese razonamiento. Siempre me intriga y me desazona, es curioso. Me pregunto si todas las artes son así.

Love can make a woman pick up a bus, or it can crush a man under the weight of a feather. Or it just lets everything go on as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. That's the kind of force love is.

Pero una vez que la vida ha echado a rodar, no puedes ponerle fin. No tienes la libertad de hacerlo. Hay que aguantar hasta el final. La vida se acabará. Sé exactamente cuánta me queda. Es como si fuera a durar eternamente. Me siento único, eterno. La inmortalidad que me consume es sólo mía.

El tiempo se dirige ahora hacia algo. Se derrama hacia atrás sin que nada lo pueda evitar, como los reflejos en el parabrisas de un automóvil que corre por la ciudad o el bosque.

Like everybody else, Guy had little appetite for the big bad news. Like everybody else, he had supped full of horrors, over breakfast, day after day, until he was numb with it, stupid with it, and his daily paper went unread.