Quote

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

Martin Amis

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Martin Amis
Age: 75
Memoirist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Abertawe
Martin Louis Amis
Body
Heart
Talent
Becomes

More quotes by Martin Amis

Image
My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.
Martin Amis
Image
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.
Martin Amis
Image
As someone once said, covers to a novel are like bars to a cage. You can watch the tiger, the Komodo dragon, and admire it - its heart, its severity. Even when they carry out an ugly act, it's still fascinating.
Martin Amis
Image
The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.
Martin Amis
Image
Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.
Martin Amis
Image
Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.
Martin Amis
Image
All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.
Martin Amis
Image
Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.
Martin Amis
Image
The trouble with life is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending.
Martin Amis
Image
Style isn't something added on it's intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life.
Martin Amis
Image
You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks.
Martin Amis
Image
When communism failed, it wasn't a good idea that had gone wrong, it was a bad idea that had been sustained with incredible determination in the face of all the commonsense arguments, and at the cost of 20 million lives at least, in Russia, to build the socialist Utopia.
Martin Amis
Image
Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.
Martin Amis
Image
When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.
Martin Amis
Image
The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.
Martin Amis
Image
We all have names we don't know about.
Martin Amis
Image
[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.
Martin Amis
Image
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
Martin Amis
Image
America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.
Martin Amis
Image
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.
Martin Amis