Quotes from Martin Amis

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic - you want all those inequalities, because that's what makes life interesting.

Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.

Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

It's a young country and a German only feels comfortable being with the masses. They have very little talent at creating an inner life, privacy. And I think there must be something wrong.

Has it ever happened to you...? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you're going to remember that moment for the rest of your life.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

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

You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

I don't think I'd like Manhattan anymore. My mother-in-law lives there, and you go there. But I like looking at it from a distance. It's a fantastic sight - every time, it awes me.

Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.

When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.

Impartially, shrewdly, I considered suicide, though not in my worst moments. The bottle of pills. The note: 'No hard feelings, everyone, but I've thought about it and it's just not on, is it? It's nearly on, but not quite. No? Anyway, all the best, C.

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

My theory is - we don't really go that far into other 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 as if anybody's there.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.