-
People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.
--
Martin Amis
#Jobs
#People
#Giving
-
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
--
Martin Amis
#Style
#Fixed
#Cruelty
-
My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
--
Martin Amis
#Paper
#Facts
-
It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, as it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay.
--
Martin Amis
#Wall
#Thinking
#Glasses
-
Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.
--
Martin Amis
#Dream
#Sleep
#Night
-
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
--
Martin Amis
#Past
#Forgotten
#Unforgettable
-
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.
--
Martin Amis
#Shadow
-
When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
--
Martin Amis
#Play
#Hours
#Lost
-
Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I'm too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.
--
Martin Amis
#Fear
#People
#Trying
-
Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.
--
Martin Amis
#Art
#Lying
#Rose
-
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
--
Martin Amis
#Alive
#Firsts
-
I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.
--
Martin Amis
#Writing
#Hands
#Long
-
when the sky is as grey as this - impeccably grey, a denial, really of the very concept of colour - and the stooped millions lift their heads, it's hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more then the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes.
--
Martin Amis
#Rain
#Eye
#Climbing
-
Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
--
Martin Amis
#Religious
#Religion
#Atheism
-
Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.
--
Martin Amis
#Giving
#Style
#Moral
-
To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.
--
Martin Amis
#Writing
#Heart
#Mind
-
I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.
--
Martin Amis
#Teaching
#Thinking
#Looks
-
Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.
--
Martin Amis
#Reality
#Belief
-
Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is...to impress your personality on the road.
--
Martin Amis
#Personality
#Purpose
#Driving
-
Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .
--
Martin Amis
#Love Is
#Men
#Love Is Blind
-
Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.
--
Martin Amis
#Book
#Years
#Rewards
-
Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
--
Martin Amis
#Weapons
#Enough
-
In the concordance of Nicola Six's kisses there were many subheads and subsections, many genres and phyla - chapter and verse, cross-references, multiple citations.
--
Martin Amis
#Kissing
#Six
#Genre
-
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.
--
Martin Amis
#Fall
#Firsts
#Chaos
-
Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
--
Martin Amis
#Love
#Black
#World
-
Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life
--
Martin Amis
#Fiction
#Way
-
Oh man sometimes I wake up feel like a cat runover. Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it's heavy. Oh it's hard. It isn't easy. Jesus, I never meant me any harm. All I wanted was a good time.
--
Martin Amis
#Jesus
#Drinking
#Cat
-
He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
--
Martin Amis
#Usual
#Six
#Alarms
