Martin Amis Quotes

Like most people, I feel ambiguous guilt for my inferiors, ambiguous envy for my superiors, and mandatory low-spirits about the system itself.

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.

When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air.

It isn't that the beau monde was too big for Capote's talents. The beau monde was too small for Capote's talents. Here, at least, in human terms the Very Rich are very poor. Interestingly, they are not interesting; incredibly, they are not even credible. They are certainly not the 'unspoiled monsters' of Capote's chapter title: they are spoiled mediocrities, they are boring freaks. The backgammon bums, the sweating champagne buckets, 'the Racquet Club, Le Jockey, the Links, White's', 'Lafayette, The Colony, La Grenouille, La Caravelle', 'Vuitton cases, Battistoni shirts, Lanvin suits, Peal shoes': how keen can a writer afford to be on all this?

Q: What’s the difference between a Communist car and a Communist proselytizer? A: You can close the door on a Communist proselytizer.

Literature is the great garden that is always there and is open to everyone 24 hours a day. Who tends it? The old tour guides and sylviculturists, the wardens, the fuming parkies in their sweat-soaked serge: these have died off. If you do see an official, a professional, these days, then he's likely to be a scowl in a labcoat, come to flatten a forest or decapitate a peak. The public wanders, with its oohs and ahs, its groans and jeers, its million opinions. The wanderers feed the animals, they walk on the grass, they step in the flowerbeds. But the garden never suffers. It is, of course, Eden; it is unfallen and needs no care.

after.” In the Preface to Volume Three he is less severe, and more persuasive: the Communist regime survived “not because there has not been any struggle against it from inside, not because people docilely surrendered to it, but because it is inhumanly strong, in a way as yet unimaginable to the West.” Among the elements of the state’s strength was its capacity to astonish, to dumbfound — and thus to delude. As Conquest says, “the reality of Stalin’s activities was often disbelieved because they seemed to be unbelievable . His whole style consisted of doing what had previously been thought morally or physically inconceivable.

The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.

To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.

It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.

Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time’s arrow moves the other way.

… I was soon wondering if I would ever again be able to attend a mass assemblage without my mind starting to play tricks on me. It wasn’t like the last occasion, when I became gradually immersed in the logistical challenge of gassing the audience. No.

When a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, “above all others,” you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit.

PC is low, low church — it is the lowest common denomination.

Words are not deeds. In published poems — we think first of Eliot's "Jew", words edge closer to deeds. In Céline's anti-Semitic textbooks, words get as close to deeds as words can well get. Blood libels scrawled on front doors are deed. In a correspondence, words are hardly even words. They are soundless cries and whispers, "gouts of bile," as Larkin characterized his political opinions, ways of saying, "Gloomy old sod, aren't I?" Or more simply, "Grrr." Correspondences are self-dramatizations. Above all, a word in a letter is never your last word on any subject. There was no public side to Larkin's prejudices, and nothing that could be construed as a racist — the word suggest a system of thought, rather than an absence of thought, which would be closer to the reality, closer to the jolts and twitches of self response.