Quote

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over.

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
Writing
Tend
Injustices
Like
Novel
Partially
Already
Abuses
Changed
Corrected
Write
Dickens
Anything
Swift
Ever
Injustice
Satirists
Great
Abuse
Satirist

More quotes by Martin Amis

Image
When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.
Martin Amis
Image
Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
Martin Amis
Image
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.
Martin Amis
Image
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.
Martin Amis
Image
When I see a lot of young faces in the audience, it's just sort of sinking in how important that is. Because you're old enough now to identify them very strongly as being young - whereas before, of course they were young, because you were young. Now it's not like that.
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
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
The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.
Martin Amis
Image
Style isn't something added on it's intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life.
Martin Amis
Image
If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.
Martin Amis
Image
There's Chile and there's Uruguay, and no one quite knows why Uruguay is so appealingly selfless because they've had their terror and their revolution like all the rest. But somehow, there's something in them.
Martin Amis
Image
Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.
Martin Amis
Image
My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.
Martin Amis
Image
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
Martin Amis
Image
On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational -- to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.
Martin Amis
Image
So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.
Martin Amis
Image
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.
Martin Amis
Image
You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren't many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can't work.
Martin Amis
Image
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.
Martin Amis
Image
The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.
Martin Amis