Quotes from Martin Amis

One recalls John Updike's argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so.

Here we come close to one of the definitions of literary fiction. Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel. Whereas you do have a conversation (you have an intense argument) with [literary fiction].

with the flat smile of the deeply inconvenienced.

I've got two backs, me - and I'm glad! Tits can be . . . mwa, I know, but they're always in the bloody road. Even in bed.

I think I'm losing my bottle. I think I'm going tonto.

Evidentemente è questa la caratteristica della città contemporanea. Puoi aver voglia di lavorarci. Ma nessuno si aspetta seriamente che tu ci viva.

Although he liked nearly everything else about himself, Keith hated his redeeming features. In his view they constituted his only major shortcoming -his one tragic flaw.

On STDs] This be Nature's way of recommending monogamy.

In my world, reserved Italians, heterosexual hairdressers, clouds without silver linings, ignoble savages, hard-hearted whores, advantageous ill-winds, sober Irishmen, and so on, are not permitted to exist.

And quite right too. Thinking back, actually, 'self-infatuation' strikes me as a rather ill-chosen word. It isn't so much that I like or love myself. Rather, I'm sentimental about myself. (I say, is this normal for someone my age?) What do I think of Charles Highway? I think: 'Charles Highway? Oh, I like him. Yes, I've got a soft spot for old Charles. He's all right is Charlie. Chuck's ... okay.

Now they were all moving to no effect-just moving, just switching things off and switching things on, just picking things up and putting things down and picking things up and stroking the cat and counting the mugs and fighting for air. It seemed that everything they did had already been done and done, and that everything they thought had already been thought and thought, and that this would never end. Excuse me said panic to each of them in turn. They had no mouth and they had to scream.

Mary wanted to get out of here and on to another plane of life; but these words weren't going to help her out. They had been put together with only one thing in mind: to lock her in.

The refusal of laughter to absent itself, in the Soviet case, has already been noted (and will be returned to). It seems that the Twenty Million will never command the sepulchral decorum of the Holocaust. This is not, or not only, a symptom of the general 'asymmetry of indulgence' (the phrase is Ferdinand Mount's). It would not be so unless something in the nature of Bolshevism permitted it to be so.

Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Khrushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: 'He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones.

It's possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Great, what do atheists shout when they do it?

To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever.

As for me, I'm a gurgling wizard of calorific excess.

Dove saremmo Tod e io senza il gabinetto? Dove saremmo senza tutta la spazzatura?

Senza mai guardare dove sta andando, la gente si muove attraverso qualcosa di predisposto, armata di bugie. Non vede l'ora di raggiungere luoghi dai quali è appena tornata, o si rammarica di aver fatto cose che non ha ancora fatto. Signori delle bugie e della spazzatura - di ogni sorta di merda e di spazzatura. [...] Lo prendiamo ancora in culo ogni mattina come tutti gli altri - ma in questi giorni la cosa finisce in un baleno.

You couldn't catch a yawn from someone you didn't like.

You are as well prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital; and your skin is a beautiful color. Look at you – look at the burnish of you.

She didn't use the misery of others to cultivate her own smugness, true, but at least I didn't go about eating all their food.

Oppression lays down blood-lust. It lays it down like a wine.

Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.