Quotes from Martin Amis

What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?

Des heard the dogs. They weren't barking, he realized, not exactly. They were swearing. And the rooftop rottweilers, faintly and almost plaintively, at this distance, were swearing back: 'FUCKOFF!' yelled Joe, or Jeff. It was almost a monosyllable. 'FUCKOFF!' 'FUCK! FUCK!' 'FUCKOFF!' 'FUCKOFF!' yelled Jeff, or Joe. 'FUCKOFF!' 'FUCK! FUCK!' 'FUCKOFF!

There are many accounts of prison floors strewn with genitals, breasts, tongues, eyes and ears. Arma virumque cano, and Hitler-Stalin tells us this, among other things: given total power over another, the human being will find that his thoughts turn to torture.

The hot macadam pulled on his shoes, like desire ...

I came of age in the Sixties, when there were chances, when it was all there waiting. Now they seep out of school – to what? To nothing, to fuck-all. The young (you can see it in their faces), the stegosaurus-rugged no-hopers, the parrot-crested blankies – they've come up with an appropriate response to this, which is: nothing. Which is nothing, which is fuck-all. The dole-queue starts at the exit to the playground.

Heat, money, sex and fever -this is it, this is New York, this is first class, this is the sharp end.

My calculations about how to stay alive and sane on this particular planet have clearly been at fault. Lots of people are plenty uglier and poorer than me without seeming to mind, without the self-hate and self-pity – the sentimentality, in a word – that makes me such a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude.

The past weaves all around this; we still duck in and out of its lost but shimmering kingdoms.

Is that why the parents of dead children spend half the rest of their lives in darkened rooms? Are they hoping the ghosts will return with all their original power? She

Es bedeutete: mehr Prüfungen, aber auch da muss ich sagen, ich hab ganz gerne feste Perspektiven, vorhersehbare Paniksituationen, auf die ich meine Ängste konzentrieren kann.

In bereavement, make yourself better, not bitter.

He was in a terrible state - that of consciousness.

Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses.

I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bare to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there's nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won't see any reason not to do you harm.

I've been told that I don't like women. I do like women. I think chicks are cool. I've been told that men don't like women, period. Oh yeah? Who does then? Because women don't like women. Sometimes life looks very familiar. Life often has that familiar look in its eyes. Life is all vendetta, conspiracy, strong feeling, roused pride, self-belief, belief in the justice of its tides and floods. Here is a secret that nobody knows: God is a woman. Look around! Of course She is.

Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief.

Lizzyboo digs me, which is just as well, because if she wants to find the way to my heart she's going to need a fucking shovel. She's going to need to dig up London Fields.

And what was astrology? Astrology was the consecration of the homocentric universe. Astrology went further than saying that the stars were all about us. Astrology said that the stars were all about me.

we took the simple step of illegalising all opposition. And the autobahn to autocracy lay clear.

Consider the Jewish joke, with the old lady running distractedly along the seashore: Help! My son the doctor is drowning. Amusing, I suppose. Her pride, I suppose, is amusing: it is greater than her love.

He had promised my payout would be halfway to six figures. And it was. It was three figures.

I attended a breakfast meeting with Fielding...half way through...the cork of nausea abruptly popped in my throat. I only just made it to the adjacent can, which was large and acoustical; my imitation of an exploding hippopotamus came through the closed door in full quadraphonic. I got one or two funny glances on my return ..and if I were them, I'd enjoy the spectacle. It does my poor ticker good to see someone really totalled.

He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by the god called Time? It won't be that convulsive, heart-bursting spell between twenty-eight and thirty-five. No. It'll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three.

London is where people go in order to come back from it sadder and wiser.