Martin Amis citations (136 citations, Page 3)

Martin Amis: 136 citations 0 J'aime

Martin Amis: Citations en anglais

“Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.”

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Martin Amis livre The Rachel Papers

Source: The Rachel Papers

“The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.”

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Martin Amis livre Money

Source: Money

“Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.”

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Martin Amis livre Money

Source: Money

“I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.”

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Martin Amis livre London Fields

London Fields (1989)

“What is this televisual mastery of Reagan's? It is a celebration of good intentions and unexceptional abilities. His style is one of hammy self-effacement, a wry dismay at his own limited talents and their drastic elevation.”

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Martin Amis

"Ronald Reagan" (1979)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“I have been outflanked by the culture. I am now seen as a drawling Oxonian, and a genetic elitist, who took over the family firm. People subconsciously think that I was born in 1922, wrote Lucky Jim when I was 7, and will live for at least a century. This feels odd to me, because my father was a "angry young man" and helped democratize the British novel. I'm not a toff. I'm a yob.”

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Martin Amis

"Off the Page: Martin Amis" (2003)

“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.”

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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.”

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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?”

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Martin Amis

"The Palace of the End" (2003)

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

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Martin Amis livre 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.”

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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.”

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Martin Amis livre 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.”

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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.”

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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'."”

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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…' - 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.”

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Martin Amis

Review of Hannibal by Thomas Harris, p. 240
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

“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.”

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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'…”

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Martin Amis

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

“Our best destiny, as planetary cohabitants, is the development of what has been called "species consciousness" — something over and above nationalisms, blocs, religions, ethnicities. During this week of incredulous misery, I have been trying to apply such a consciousness, and such a sensibility. Thinking of the victims, the perpetrators, and the near future, I felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear.”

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Martin Amis

"Fear and loathing" (2001)

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

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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).”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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”

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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.”

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Martin Amis livre 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.”

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Martin Amis livre 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.”

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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.”

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Martin Amis

"Fear and loathing" (2001)

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