110+ Martin Amis Quotes On Death, Satirical And Absurdist

Martin Amis was a British author who wrote novels, short stories and non-fiction. He was born in 1949 and was the son of the novelist Kingsley Amis. His works include Money, London Fields and The Information. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Martin Amis on death, satirical, absurdist.

Top 10 Martin Amis Quotes

1. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
2. Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
3. When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
4. Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.
5. Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .
6. Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them.
7. Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
8. These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.
9. Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.
10. I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.

Martin Amis Short Quotes

• Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
• Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.
• The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.
• He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
• While making love, we often talk about money. I like it. I like that dirty talk
• [On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.
• At its grandest, political correctness is an attempt to accelerate evolution.
• So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.
• The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.
• Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

Martin Amis Quotes About Life

Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark - spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving. — Martin Amis

Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world. — Martin Amis

This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling. — Martin Amis

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal. — Martin Amis

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life. — Martin Amis

Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic - you want all those inequalities, because that's what makes life interesting. — Martin Amis

When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life. — Martin Amis

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...) — Martin Amis

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life — Martin Amis

Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say? — Martin Amis

Martin Amis Quotes About People

People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts. — Martin Amis

It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead. — Martin Amis

You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren't many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can't work. — Martin Amis

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

My theory is - we don’t really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and ask quickly if anybody’s there. — Martin Amis

I think a lot of people who read fiction are interested in subtlety. But they wouldn't like my stuff. It's a bit too violent for many tastes. — Martin Amis

People look at fame and feel deprived if they haven't got it, feeling that this is a basic, almost a human right, a civil right. And also feel the same way about wealth, I suppose - why haven't I got it? — Martin Amis

Martin Amis Famous Quotes And Sayings

I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. — Martin Amis

If you want to know the real meaning of pornography, it is the utter dissociation of love and sex, the banishment of love from the sexual arena. — Martin Amis

Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them... A religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. — Martin Amis

The trouble with life is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending. — Martin Amis

Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism. — Martin Amis

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. — Martin Amis

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

It's without doubt my main subject. The way masculinity can go wrong. And I'm something of a gynocrat in a utopian kind of way. — Martin Amis

The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was 'better' than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America. — Martin Amis

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. — Martin Amis

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? — Martin Amis

Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time. — Martin Amis

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over. — Martin Amis

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that? — Martin Amis

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

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. — Martin Amis

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor. — Martin Amis

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice. — Martin Amis

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body. — Martin Amis

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

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. — Martin Amis

When communism failed, it wasn't a good idea that had gone wrong, it was a bad idea that had been sustained with incredible determination in the face of all the commonsense arguments, and at the cost of 20 million lives at least, in Russia, to build the socialist Utopia. — Martin Amis

It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle. — Martin Amis

How incredibly avaricious the whole operation was, the way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half price for children.... It was a kind of exploration of evil. Just how bad can we get? — Martin Amis

So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me. — Martin Amis

You can't be up the reader's ass, as many a writer I think is - cute as hell, ingratiating as hell. But that's not loving the reader in the right way. That's toadying to the reader. — Martin Amis

Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. — Martin Amis

In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong. — Martin Amis

Suicide is what everyone young thinks they'll do before they get old. But they hardly ever get round to it. They just don't want to commit themselves in that way. When you're young and you look ahead, time ends in mist at twenty-five. 'Old won't happen to me', you say. But old does. Oh, old does. Old always gets you in the end. — Martin Amis

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. — Martin Amis

America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short. — Martin Amis

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. — Martin Amis

You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks. — Martin Amis

What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. — Martin Amis

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike. — Martin Amis

If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are. — Martin Amis

They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye. — Martin Amis

When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a long time before you can really say you're a writer. You've got to stand the test of time, which is the only real test there is. — Martin Amis

I want incremental improvements. There's the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general - it's dreadful. — Martin Amis

It is straightforward — and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion. — Martin Amis

For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound. — Martin Amis

When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer. — Martin Amis

When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile. — Martin Amis

America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions. — Martin Amis

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. — Martin Amis

You can't sort of write the novel as if you're taking dictation from heaven. — Martin Amis

Well, my father Kingsley Amis was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it was good that I began when I was young and bold and foolish, otherwise I'd have become too self-conscious and aware of the weight of not having written anything yet. — Martin Amis

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer. — Martin Amis

When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower. — Martin Amis

Style isn't something added on; it's intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life. — Martin Amis

I sometimes feel I'm a sort of cult writer, rather than a mainstream writer, in that those who like my stuff like it a lot, but the appeal is not that broad. — Martin Amis

I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success. — Martin Amis

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

He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness. — Martin Amis

When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don't say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure. — Martin Amis

Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette. — Martin Amis

No-one is going to sit down and read Bleak House to the family any more, but they can all huddle up happily in front of Charles Bronson. — Martin Amis

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded. — Martin Amis

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write. — Martin Amis

Has it ever happened to you...? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you're going to remember that moment for the rest of your life. — Martin Amis

Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find. — Martin Amis

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived. — Martin Amis

All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction. — Martin Amis

I would say I'm an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just turn up the volume dial. Which is a technique of science fiction, apart from anything else. — Martin Amis

I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.) — Martin Amis

Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are. — Martin Amis

Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief. — Martin Amis

You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal — Martin Amis

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. — Martin Amis

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for. — Martin Amis

If you feel you have a strong constituency among the young, you can really die happy, because the great unanswered question, the only valid value judgment is whether you're going to last, and that tells you that you are, for a bit at least. — Martin Amis

There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England. — Martin Amis

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

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands. — Martin Amis

Every day, the dispensing of existence.... Its face is fierce and distant and ancient. — Martin Amis

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. — Martin Amis

My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May. — Martin Amis

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be. — Martin Amis

Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time. — Martin Amis

Life Lessons by Martin Amis

1. Martin Amis teaches us to be honest and open about our feelings and experiences, and to never be afraid to speak our truth.
2. He encourages us to take risks and never be afraid to try something new, even if it seems difficult or intimidating.
3. He reminds us that life is precious and to make the most of it by living in the present moment and appreciating all of its beauty.