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Martin Amis Quotes

1949–2023 England

Sir Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949 – 19 May 2023) was a British novelist, essayist and short story writer. He was the son of Kingsley Amis.

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Random Martin Amis quote

90 quotes

It's been said that happiness writes white. It doesn't show up on the page.

It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment.

Fear and loathing (2001)

Like all "acts of terrorism" (easily and unsubjectively defined as organized violence against civilians), September 11 was an attack on morality...

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.

Einstein's Monsters (1987)

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

The voice of the lonely crowd (2002)

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.

Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin (1997)

I think enlightenment is incremental, and I see it in my children.

Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin (1997)

Interacting with literature is easy.

The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

You know, it's not the rich who're really different from us. It's the beautiful.

The Pregnant Widow (2010)

Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

London Fields (1989)

Terrorism undermines morality. Then, too, it undermines reason.

The Palace of the End (2003)

A joke is by definition politically incorrect — it assumes a butt, and a certain superiority in the teller. The culture won't put up with that for much longer.

Off the Page: Martin Amis (2003)

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

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.

The voice of the lonely crowd (2002)

When you review an exhibition of paintings you don't compose a painting about it … But when you review a prose-narrative then you write a prose-narrative about that prose-narrative…

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.

The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

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

Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin (1997)

It now seems that pornography is the leading sex educator in the Western world.

Playboy interview (2003)

His indivisibility judges their hedging and trimming. His honesty judges their watchfulness.

Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin (1997)

Poets don't drive. Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poems.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Martin Amis (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.