Martin Amis

England
Born on 25 Aug 1949
Writer

Quotes

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

Time's Arrow
It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can�t respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubation period.
I used to think there was no time like the present. I used to think there was no time but the present. Now I know better�or different, anyway. In the end, the past will always be there. The past is all there is: the present never sticks around for long enough, and the future is anybody�s guess. In time, you always have to hand it to the past. It always gets you in the end.

Other People
The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)
You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.

The Rachel Papers
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
When you're in love and trying to make someone love you back, you can hear the texture of your own footfalls, the whistling passage of your breath. Invisible eyes monitor you constantly: even at night something presides over the shape of your sleep. Every thought carries a tick or a cross.

Other People
A writer�s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you get that with every novel, but more so when you write about these epics of human suffering. I felt that just as much when I wrote about the Gulag. Every writer knows what that is. The process goes� you have to think: �This novel I am writing is no good.� Then you have to think: �All my novels are no good.� And then, when you reach that point, you can begin.
Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.

House of Meetings
To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.

Time's Arrow
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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