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Martin Amis: 272 quotes2 likes

“Like all obsessions, Ballard's novel is occasionally boring and frequently ridiculous. The invariance of its intensity is not something the reviewer can easily suggest. Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain. You finish the book with some bafflement and irritation. But this is only half the experience. You then sit around waiting for the novel to come and haunt you. And it does.”

Martin Amis

Review of The Day of Creation by J. G. Ballard, p. 109
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares — loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains.”

Martin Amis

"Hugh Hefner" (1985)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“Words are not deeds. In published poems — we think first of Eliot's "Jew", words edge closer to deeds. In Céline's anti-Semitic textbooks, words get as close to deeds as words can well get. Blood libels scrawled on front doors are deed.
In a correspondence, words are hardly even words. They are soundless cries and whispers, "gouts of bile," as Larkin characterized his political opinions, ways of saying, "Gloomy old sod, aren't I?" Or more simply, "Grrr."
Correspondences are self-dramatizations. Above all, a word in a letter is never your last word on any subject. There was no public side to Larkin's prejudices, and nothing that could be construed as a racist — the word suggest a system of thought, rather than an absence of thought, which would be closer to the reality, closer to the jolts and twitches of self response.”

Martin Amis

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

“Just as a Philistine does not on the whole devote his life to his art, so a misogynist does not devote his inner life to women. Larkin's men friends devolved into pen-pals. Such intimacies as he shared, he shared with women.”

Martin Amis

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

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

Martin Amis

The Observer [London] (30 August 1987)

“They can't ban or burn Larkin's books. What they can embark on is the more genteel process of literary demotion.”

Martin Amis

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

“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 to use 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.”

Martin Amis book Einstein's Monsters

"Introduction: Thinkability"
Einstein's Monsters (1987)

“Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.”

Martin Amis

"First Lady on Trial" The Sunday Times [London] (17 March 1996) (Online text in PDF format) http://www.martinamisweb.com/commentary_files/ma_takesavillage.pdf#search=%22%22now%20the%20twin%20addictions%20of%20the%20culture%22%22

“What is the deep background on the deep male? From 100,000 BC until, let's say, 1792 — Mary Wollstonecraft and her Vindication of the Rights of Women — there was simply the man, whose main characteristics was that he got away with everything. From 1792 until about 1970, there was, in theory anyway, the "enlightened" man, who, while continuing to get away with everything, agreed to meet women to talk about talks which would lead to political concessions. Post-1970, the enlightened man became the new man, who isn't interested in getting away with anything, who believes, indeed, that the female is not merely equal to the male but is his plain superior.”

Martin Amis

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

“Not many people know this, but on top of writing regularly for every known newspaper and magazine, Anthony Burgess writes regularly for every unknown one, too. Pick up a Hungarian quarterly or a Portuguese tabloid - and there is Burgess, discoursing on goulash or test-driving the new Fiat 500. 'Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.' Even today, at seventy, and still producing book after book, Burgess spends half his time writing music. He additionally claims to do all the housework.”

Martin Amis

Opening paragraph of his review of Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess, p. 123
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

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

Martin Amis

"Kurt Vonnegut" (1983)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.”

Martin Amis

Interview with Robert Birnbaum (8 December 2003) http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum135.php

“Laughter always forgives.”

Martin Amis

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

“The 20th century, with its scores of millions of supernumerary dead, has been called the age of ideology. And the age of ideology, clearly, was a mere hiatus in the age of religion, which shows no sign of expiry. Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. 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. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward — and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.”

Martin Amis

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

“Beautifully written... the webs of imagery that Harris has so carefully woven... contains writing of which our best writers would be proud... there is not a singly ugly or dead sentence...”

Martin Amis

or so sang the critics. Hannibal is a genre novel, and all genre novels contain dead sentences - unless you feel the throb of life in such periods as 'Tommaso put the lid back on the cooler' or 'Eric Pickford answered' or 'Pazzi worked like a man possessed' or 'Margot laughed in spite of herself' or 'Bob Sneed broke the silence.' What these commentators must be thinking of, I suppose, are the bits when Harris goes all blubbery and portentous (every other phrase a spare tyre), or when, with a fugitive poeticism, he swoons us to a dying fall: 'Starling looked for a moment through the wall, past the wall, out to forever and composed herself...' 'It seemed forever ago...' 'He looked deep, deep into her eyes...' 'His dark eyes held her whole...' Needless to say, Harris has become a serial murderer of English sentences, and Hannibal is a necropolis of prose.
Review of Hannibal by Thomas Harris, p. 240
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)