Quotes from Martin Amis

Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It's not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence

Aged seventy-three, he had just finished a book on the King's English; and now English was a language the King no longer had. His fate was a brutal reminder. We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains.

Hamlet doesn't fully see that his metaphysical miseries constitute a subliminal symptom of grief; and this was exactly my case. I thought I was sick, I thought I was dying (maybe that is what bereavement actually asks of you). Literature gives us these warnings about the main events, but we don't recognize the warnings until the events have come and gone. Isabel, my senior in the loss of a sibling, told me that you just have to take it, like weather—yes, like sleet in your face.

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

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

This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.

If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.

Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.

Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it's a funny thing, but I'm an exception to that rule.'

Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.

My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.

People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.

For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.

The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.

It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.