Quotes from Martin Amis

So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was 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.

The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.

Of all the forces, love is the strongest...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.

This had seemed a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life.

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever.

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

People who go to the Opera, they don't go to the toilet, not even at home.

What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.

Maybe love will be like driving. When people move—when they travel—they look where they've come from, not where they're going.

Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief.

So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answered everywhere you looked, in every headline and haircut: if, at any moment, nothing might matter, then who said that nothing didn't matter already?

But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.

When you considered this world--people winched up and lowered down into the earth in steel cages and speed-fed through the tunnels, with doors cracking everywhere, and arctic winds mingling with dusty gaps of fire from the planet's core--it was hard to believe how delicate life was, how breakable things were.

America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.

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

Who let the dogs in? ...This, we fear, is going to be the question. Who let the dogs in? Who let the dogs in? Who? Who?

Robert Conquest once suggested that 'a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler.

Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.

Her body is probably naked by now but there is nothing as naked as human eyes: they haven't even got skin over them.

Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time's arrow moves the other way.