Martin Amis Quotes - Page 5

Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.

I don't think I'd like Manhattan anymore. My mother-in-law lives there, and you go there. But I like looking at it from a distance. It's a fantastic sight - every time, it awes me.

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.

Amis is acutely, vibrantly sensitive to the different registers of laughter. He knows that it can be the most affirming and uniquely human sound, and also the most sinister and animalistic one. He understands every note of every octave that separates the liberating shout of mirth from the cackle of a bully or the snigger of a sadist.

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.

It's often said of American politics that it's a huge juggernaut and the president can change the direction by two or three degrees in either direction, but not much more. In fact, I think the president's power is limited, much more than the prime minister in England.

That certain snobbery of certainly the Parisian - combined with a complete denial of your historical legacy, is just awful. That's a funny thing about France. Saul Bellow wrote somewhere that he saw right through the French. He lived there. He wrote The Adventures of Augie March in Paris, and there's no one better than him to say what's unbearable about the French.

It's a young country and a German only feels comfortable being with the masses. They have very little talent at creating an inner life, privacy. And I think there must be something wrong.

In the concordance of Nicola Six's kisses there were many subheads and subsections, many genres and phyla - chapter and verse, cross-references, multiple citations.

The Democratic Party represents the American brain, and the Republicans represent not the American heart, or soul, but the American gut. The argument between brain and bowel, everywhere else in the Free World, has been decided long ago in favor of brain. But Americans still - it still divides the nation, this question, here in America.

It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

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.

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

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .

Seeing the world anew, as if it were new, is as old as writing. It's what all painters are trying to do, to see what's there, to see it in a way that renews it. It becomes more and more urgent as the planet gets worn flat and forest after forest is slain to print the paper for people's impressions to be scrawled down on. It becomes harder and harder to be original, to see things with an innocent eye. Innocence is much tied up with it. As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to see it.

I think Jorge Borges said that when Argentineans die they turn into angels and go and live in Uruguay. But for the rest of South America, you have to say that it's getting there - becoming civilized - and will get there. It's had a real grit war in history. The choice between those societies until recently was the choice between tyranny and chaos. Everyone understood that. You've got to have a strong man, or it's going to be a mess.

At its grandest, political correctness is an attempt to accelerate evolution.

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.)

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw--that of outright unreadability.

What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.

The egotism of people who are eminent without being in the least distinguished and somehow feeling that's their due - that seems to me to be a peculiarly English phenomenon.

Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.

So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.

[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.