Martin Amis Quotes - Page 2

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.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

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.

Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.

The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.

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.

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.

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

It's hard to make progress with grief.

The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists - haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations.

I think writers are excited by stupidity and bad behavior, generally.

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.

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?

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

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.

Laughter always forgives.

I've always said that the big difference between South America and North America with regard to the native population is that in North America they raped them and killed them, and in South America they raped them and married them. The mix was much greater, and that was very good.

I don't think I've ever been particularly scared of death - but scared of dying, the process. It doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.

The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.

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

I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.

In her final months Princess Diana was being shat upon by the tabloids -- basically for sleeping with an Arab. When she died, these same papers were astonished by the millennial wave of emotionalism that swept the country ... One paper had a print-ready story about what a slag the Princess was, and they had to pull it at the last moment. It was replaced with an image of Diana as an angel, ascending to heaven.

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.

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.