Explore Quotes by 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.

I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.

Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.

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

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.

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.

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.

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.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

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.

While making love, we often talk about money. I like it. I like that dirty talk

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

Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them.

You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.

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.

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

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

Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.

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