Martin Amis Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.”

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

“It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.”

“The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.”

“Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.”

“When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.”

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

“All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'”

“Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.”

“When I wrote 'The Pregnant Widow' three or four years ago, I tried to reread my first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' because their young heroes are the same age. I couldn't finish it. It seemed to me so technically slapdash and weak.”