Martin Amis

England
Born on 25 Aug 1949
Writer

Quotes

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The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they�re taking us where we don�t want to go.
I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bare to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there's nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won't see any reason not to do you harm.
This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.

Experience: A Memoir
Ideology brings about a disastrous fusion: that of violence and righteousness � a savagery without stain.

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
Making lots of money - it's not that hard, you know. It's overestimated. Making lots of money is a breeze. You watch.

Money
Pain is nature�s way of telling us that something is wrong. Patiently, pain goes on telling us this, long after we�ve got the message.

Money
Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move.

Money
How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing towards me over the uneven ground.

Time's Arrow
Give the reader hell. Stretch the reader.
The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) 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.

Experience: A Memoir
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays