Quotes from Martin Amis

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .

You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

I can imagine in a century or two that rule by women will be seen as a better bet than rule by men. What's wrong with men is that they tend to look for the violent solution. Women don't.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

When you've lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.

These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.

Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.

It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.

People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

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

Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

Watching an adaptation of your novel can be a violent experience: seeing your old jokes suddenly thrust at you can be alarming. But I started to enjoy 'Money' very quickly, and then I relaxed.

When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.

In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.

One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.

My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.