Martin Amis Quotes
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Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.
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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.
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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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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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When I wrote 'The Pregnant Widow' three or four years ago, I tried to reread my first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' because their young heroes are the same age. I couldn't finish it. It seemed to me so technically slapdash and weak.
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It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.
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You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.
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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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In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.
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All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.
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The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.
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I think it's a very confused culture. On the one hand, no one is better than anyone else; no one is prettier. On the other hand, everyone is completely obsessed by their looks and by how they strike the world. On the one hand, we're all equal; on the other hand, everyone's a superstar. It's all very irrational, like all ideology.
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Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
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Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
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By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.
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Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, 'Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.'
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Does screen violence provide a window or a mirror? Is it an effect or a cause, an encouragement, a facilitation? Fairly representatively, I think, I happen to like screen violence while steadily execrating its real-life counterpart. Moreover, I can tell the difference between the two. One is happening, one is not.
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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' - deliberately, at least - to please the other.
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The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
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Our vulgar delight in American vulgarity.
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Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
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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.
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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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I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.