1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Martin Amis

Martin Amis Quotes
page 2

Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. His best-known novels are Money and London Fields . He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice . Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.Amis's work centres on the excesses of "late-capitalist" Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". Inspired by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself has influenced many British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. August 1949  •  Other names Martin Louis Amis
Martin Amis photo
Martin Amis: 136 quotes2 likes

Martin Amis Quotes

“What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything.”

Martin Amis

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

“Exploitative is the key word here. It suggests that while you are free to be as sexually miserable as you like, the moment you exchange hard cash for a copy of Playboy, you are in the pornography perpetuation business, and your misery becomes political.
The truth is that pornography is just a sad affair all around. It is there because men in their hundreds of millions want it to be there. Killing pornography is like killing the messenger. The extent to which Larkin was "dependent" on pornography should be a measure our pity, or even our sympathy. But Motion hears the beep of his political pager, and he stands to attention.”

Martin Amis

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

“All US presidents — and all US presidential candidates — have to be religious or have to pretend to be religious. More specifically, they have to subscribe to "born again" Christianity. Bush, with his semi-compulsory prayer-breakfasts and so on, isn't pretending to be religious… We hear about the successful "Texanisation" of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?”

Martin Amis

"The Palace of the End" (2003)

“Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.”

Martin Amis book Einstein's Monsters

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

“September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.”

Martin Amis

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

“"Einstein's Monsters," by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.”

Martin Amis book Einstein's Monsters

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

“I'm not sure what the American convulsion at the moment is, but I get the impression that people have moved beyond political correctness there by now. But here it lingers, although much ridiculed.”

Martin Amis

Playboy interview (2003)

“It occurs to you that Ulysses is about cliché. It is about inherited, ready-made formulations - most notably Irish Catholicism and anti-Semitism. After all, prejudices are clichés: they are secondhand hatreds... Joyce never uses a cliché in innocence.”

Martin Amis

Review of Ulysses by James Joyce, p. 444
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“After September 11, then, writers faced quantitative change, but not qualitative change. In the following days and weeks, the voices coming from their rooms were very quiet; still, they were individual voices, and playfully rational, all espousing the ideology of no ideology. They stood in eternal opposition to the voice of the lonely crowd, which, with its yearning for both power and effacement, is the most desolate sound you will ever hear. "Desolate": "giving an impression of bleak and dismal emptiness… from L. desolat-, desolare 'abandon', from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone'."”

Martin Amis

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

“The notion of the "axis of evil" has an interesting provenance. In early drafts of the President's speech the "axis of evil" was the "axis of hatred", "axis" having been settled on for its associations with the enemy in the second world war. The "axis of hatred" at this point consisted of only two countries, Iran and Iraq. whereas of course the original axis consisted of three (Germany, Italy, Japan). It was additionally noticed that Iran and Iraq, while not both Arab, were both Muslim. So they brought in North Korea.
We may notice, in this embarras of the inapposite, that the Axis was an alliance, whereas Iran and Iraq are blood-bespattered enemies, and the zombie nation of North Korea is, in truth, so mortally ashamed of itself that it can hardly bear to show its face.”

Martin Amis

"The Palace of the End" (2003)

“Like Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince, 'N', as he is called, uses quotation marks for such vulgarisms as 'sulks,' 'commuters' and 'worthwhile activities', as well as for phrases like 'too good to be true', 'the wrong end of the stick' and 'keep in touch.' The reader reflects that a cliché or approximation, wedged between two inverted commas, is still a cliché or approximation. Besides, you see how it would 'get on your nerves' if I were to 'go on' like this 'the whole time'…”

Martin Amis

Review of The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch, p. 92
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“[I am] secular to the bones, but not an atheist.”

Martin Amis

Quoted in Philip Ottermann, "Beyond belief," http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2289254,00.html The Guardian (5 July 2008)

“We accept that there are legitimate casus belli: acts or situations "provoking or justifying war". The present debate feels off-centre, and faintly unreal, because the US and the UK are going to war for a new set of reasons (partly undisclosed) while continuing to adduce the old set of reasons (which in this case do not cohere or even overlap).”

Martin Amis

"The Palace of the End" (2003)

“Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity.”

Martin Amis

"Joan Didion" (1980)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.”

Martin Amis

"Phantom of the Opera: The Republicans in 1988" (1988)
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993)

“As elsewhere in his writing, Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.”

Martin Amis

Review of Palimpsest, p. 281
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“When you review an exhibition of paintings you don't compose a painting about it, when you review a film you don't make a film about it and when you review a new CD you don't make a little CD about it. But when you review a prose-narrative then you write a prose-narrative about that prose-narrative and those who write the secondary prose-narrative, let's face it, must have once had dreams of writing the primary prose-narrative. And so there is a kind of hierarchy of envy and all those other things.”

Martin Amis

Interview with Ramona Koval on Radio National (4 September 1999) http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s21638.htm

“Vidal is determined to be a) in the thick of things, and b) above the fray. He knows everybody and he doesn't want to know anybody. He has had lovers by the thousand while doing 'nothing”

Martin Amis

deliberately, at least — to please the other.
Review of Palimpsest by Gore Vidal, p. 279
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“Bujak spoke of Einstein as if he were God's literary critic, God being a poet. I, more stolidly, tend to suspect that God is a novelist — a garrulous and deeply unwholesome one too.”

Martin Amis book Einstein's Monsters

"Bujak and the Strong Force"
Einstein's Monsters (1987)

“She was sitting there beside the bookcase, trying to read, in a growing panic of self-consciousness. Why? Because reading presupposed a future.”

Martin Amis book London Fields

London Fields (1989)

“The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists — haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations.”

Martin Amis

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

“A week after the attack, one is free to taste the bile of its atrocious ingenuity. It is already trite — but stringently necessary — to emphasise that such a mise en scène would have embarrassed a studio executive's storyboard or a thriller-writer's notebook ("What happened today was not credible," were the wooden words of Tom Clancy, the author of The Sum of All Fears). And yet in broad daylight and full consciousness that outline became established reality: a score or so of Stanley knives produced two million tons of rubble.”

Martin Amis

"Fear and loathing" (2001)

“One wonders how the literary revisionists and canon cleansers can bear to take the money. Imagine a school of sixteenth century art criticism that spent its time contently jeering at the past for not knowing about perspective.”

Martin Amis

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

“Not greatly gifted, not deeply beautiful, Madonna tells America that fame comes from wanting it badly enough. And everyone is terribly good at badly wanting things.”

Martin Amis

"Madonna" (1992)
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993)

“The doltish euphemism of conglomerate America.”

Martin Amis

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

“The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.”

Martin Amis

"Claus von Bülow" (1983)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending …”

Martin Amis book Experience

Introduction
Experience (2000)

“It would be inaccurate to say that John Fowles is a middlebrow writer who sometimes hopes he is a highbrow: it has never occurred to him to believe otherwise. There is a difference, morally.”

Martin Amis

Opening lines of his review of Mantissa by John Fowles, p. 138
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“It isn't that the beau monde was too big for Capote's talents. The beau monde was too small for Capote's talents. Here, at least, in human terms the Very Rich are very poor. Interestingly, they are not interesting; incredibly, they are not even credible. They are certainly not the 'unspoiled monsters' of Capote's chapter title: they are spoiled mediocrities, they are boring freaks. The backgammon bums, the sweating champagne buckets, 'the Racquet Club, Le Jockey, the Links, White's', 'Lafayette, The Colony, La Grenouille, La Caravelle', 'Vuitton cases, Battistoni shirts, Lanvin suits, Peal shoes': how keen can a writer afford to be on all this?”

Martin Amis

Review of "Answered Prayers" by Truman Capote, p. 311
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.”

Martin Amis book Experience

Part I: Failures of Tolerance
Experience (2000)

“In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.”

Martin Amis

"Gore Vidal" (1977)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“Sex has become much more competitive, with the girls becoming sort of predators as well. It's ferocious.”

Martin Amis

Playboy interview (2003)

“Of obvious appeal to the humourless is the writer who comes on stage in a clown outfit or King Kong suit, with party hat and harem slippers, with banana skins and custard pies… It remains a sound rule that funny journalism can only flourish as the offshoot or sideline of something larger. No funny journalist who is that and nothing more will ever write anything lastingly funny.”

Martin Amis

Review of The Best of Modern Humour edited by Mordecai Richler, p. 364
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“Our vulgar delight in American vulgarity.”

Martin Amis

"The New Evangelists" (1980)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“Tell a dream, lose a reader, said Henry James. Joyce told a dream, Finnegans Wake, and he told it in puns - cornily but rightly regarded as the lowest form of wit. This showed fantastic courage, and fantastic introversion. The truth is Joyce didn't love the reader, as you need to do. Well, he gave us Ulysses, incontestably the central modernist masterpiece; it is impossible to conceive of any future novel that might give the form such a violent evolutionary lurch. You can't help wondering, though. Joyce could have been the most popular boy in school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher's pet.”

Martin Amis

Review of Ulysses, p. 446
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“No one in the history of the written word, not even William MacGonagall, or Spike Milligan or D. H. Lawrence, is so wide open to damaging quotation. Try this, more or less at random: 'A murderer in the moment of his murder could feel a sense of beauty and perfection as complete as the transport of a saint.' Or this: Film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long. His italics.
On every page Mailer will come up with a formulation both grandiose and crass. This is expected of him. It is also expected of the reviewer to introduce a lingering 'yet' or 'however' at some point, and say that 'somehow' Mailer's 'fearless honesty' redeems his notorious excesses. He isn't frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn't frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn't frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses. Perhaps he ought to be a little less frightened of being frightened.”

Martin Amis

Review of The Essential Mailer by Norman Mailer, p. 267
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction. I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled.”

Martin Amis

"Introduction"
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don’t want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.”

Martin Amis book Einstein's Monsters

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

“PC is low, low church — it is the lowest common denomination.”

Martin Amis

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

“The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.”

Martin Amis book Einstein's Monsters

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

“While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw - that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedy; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75 per cent of the whole), inhumanly dull…. Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 - the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right: not tears of relief but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.”

Martin Amis

Opening paragraph of his review of The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Tobias Smollett
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“Bly is a poet, he is a big cat, so to speak, and not some chipmunk from the how-to culture. But it is the how-to culture that has picked up on his book. … And yet, for a while Iron John transformed male consciousness in the United States. The wild men weekends and initiation, adventure holidays and whatnot, which were big business, may prove to be ephemeral. But what does one make of the unabashed references in the press to "men's liberation" and the men's movement and the fact that there are now at least half a dozen magazines devoted to nothing else? Changing men, journeymen, man. … Bly's average reader is not a poet and a critic, but a weightlifter from Brooklyn.”

Martin Amis

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

“Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.”

Martin Amis

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

“Iron John, a short work of psychological, literary and anthropological speculation by the poet Robert Bly, dominated the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year and made, as we shall see, a significant impact on many aspects of American life. In England, it made no impression whatever. … We are British over in Britain, we are skeptical, ironical, et cetera, and are not given, as Americans are, to seeking expert advice on basic matters. Especially such matters as our manhood. In England, maleness itself has become an embarrassment: male consciousness, male pride, male rage, we don't want to hear about.”

Martin Amis

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

“Kingsley fell over. And this was no brisk trip or tumble. It was an act of colossal administration. First came a kind of slow-leak effect, giving me the immediate worry that Kingsley, when fully deflated, would spread out into the street on both sides of the island, where there were cars, trucks, sneezing buses. Next, as I grabbed and tugged, he felt like a great ship settling on its side: would it right itself, or go under? Then came an impression of overall dissolution and the loss of basic physical coherence. I groped around him, looking for places to shore him up, but every bit of him was falling, dropping, seeking the lowest level, like a mudslide.”

Martin Amis book Experience

Part II: One Little More Hug
Experience (2000)

“On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational — to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.”

Martin Amis

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

“Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth's poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics — his attitude to the poor, say, or his unconscious 'valorization' of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped.”

Martin Amis

Foreword, p. xii
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes — homosexuality, sexual disease, and death — about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.”

Martin Amis

"Making Sense of AIDS" (1985)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“His last words were spoken to a woman, to the nurse who was holding his hand. Perhaps we all have the last words ready when we go into the last room. Perhaps the thing about last words is not how good they are, but whether we can get them out. What Larkin said faintly was, "I'm going to the inevitable."”

Martin Amis

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

“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)