Well, my father Kingsley Amis was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it was good that I began when I was young and bold and foolish, otherwise I'd have become too self-conscious and aware of the weight of not having written anything yet.

Martin Amis

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.

Martin Amis

jobs giving people

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full contact - all that?

Martin Amis

soul heart two

Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.

Martin Amis

mother father years

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

Martin Amis

cruelty fixed style

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

Martin Amis

paper facts

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.

Martin Amis

dream sleep night

Laughter always forgives.

Martin Amis

forgiving laughter

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.

Martin Amis

wall glasses thinking

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Martin Amis

unforgettable forgotten past

To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.

Martin Amis

mind heart writing

Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.

Martin Amis

characteristics superficial culture

It's hard to make progress with grief.

Martin Amis

hard progress grief

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.

Martin Amis

different book years

More will mean worse.

Martin Amis

conflict mean

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.

Martin Amis

native very-good married

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.

Martin Amis

closure venus littles

Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.

Martin Amis

talent body heart

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

Martin Amis

addiction bed sometimes

It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

Martin Amis

arses achievement people

Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

Martin Amis

mother writing teacher