Martin Amis Quotes
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Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
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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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The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.
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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.
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Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it's a funny thing, but I'm an exception to that rule.'
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It's been said that happiness writes white. It doesn't show up on the page. When you're on holiday and writing a letter home to a friend, no one wants a letter that says the food is good and the weather is charming and the accommodations comfortable. You want to hear about lost passports and rat-filled shacks.
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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.'
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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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This moment was the apotheosis of the postmodern era - the era of images and perceptions. Wind conditions were also favourable; within hours, Manhattan looked as though it had taken 10 megatons.
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I'd like to be remembered as someone who kept the comic novel going for another generation or so. I fear the comic novel is in retreat. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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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When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.
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Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do - like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.
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When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.
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It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.
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It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment. Until then, America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her.
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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.
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All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'
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Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
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In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.
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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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Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.