“He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“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, quote from The Information
“Some junk novels were all about airports. Some junk novels were even called things like Airport. Why, then you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? …Junk novels have been around for at least as long as non-junk novels, and airports haven’t been around for very long at all. But they both really took off at the same time. Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“there in the night their bed had the towelly smell of marriage.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“You couldn't catch a yawn from someone you didn't like.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“It must make you feel nice and young to say that being a man means nothing and being a woman means nothing and what matters is being a...person. How about being a spider, Gwyn. Let's imagine you're a spider. You're a spider, and you've just had your first serious date. You're limping away from that now, and you're looking over your shoulder, and there's your girlfriend, eating one of your legs like a chicken drumstick. What would you say? I know. You'd say: I find I never think in terms of male spiders or in terms of female spiders. I find I always think in terms of...spiders”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“Being photographed was dead time for the soul. Can the head think, while it does the same half smile under the same light frown? If this was all true, then Richard's soul was in great shape. No one photographed him any more, not even his wife. When the photographs came back from an increasingly infrequent holiday. Richard was never there..an elbow or earlobe on the edge of the frame, on the edge of life and love..”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“Richard didn't mind Gwyn being rich...Having always been poor was good preparation for being rich. Better than having always been rich...The well and all its sweet water would surely one day run dry.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“He was in a terrible state - that of consciousness.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“These days he smoked and drank largely to solace himself for what drinking and smoking had done to him, so he drank and smoked a lot. He experimented, furthermore, with pretty well any other drug he could get his hands on,”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“Perché piangono gli uomini? Per colpa delle lotte e delle gesta e della maratona delle promozioni, perché vogliono la mamma, perché restano ciechi anche col passar del tempo, per colpa di tutte le erezioni che debbono inventarsi sul più bello dal nulla, per colpa di tutto ciò che hanno fatto. Perché non possono più essere felici o tristi – solo sbronzi o pazzi. E perché non sanno che pesci pigliare quando sono svegli.
E poi c'è l'informazione, che arriva di notte.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to the culture of the waiting room. Piped music, the language of calming suasion. Come this way--yes, the flight attendant will see you now. Airports, junk novels: they were taking your mind off mortal fear.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“Girls, in those days, couldn't do anything to you (they couldn't call the lawyers, the tabloids, the cops) except kill themselves or get pregnant. All they had was life: they could augment it, they could bear it away. They could subtract from it or they could add to it; and that was all.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“Literature...describes a descent. First, gods. Then demigods. Then epic became tragedy: failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class and its mercantile dreams. Then it was about you--Gina, Gilda: social realism. Then it was about them: lowlife. Villains. The ironic age...Literature, for a while, can be about us...:about writers. But that won't last long. How do we burst clear of all this? And he asked them: Whither the novel? ... Supposing...that the progress of literature (downward) was forced in that direction by the progress of cosmology (upward--up, up). For human beings, the history of cosmology is the history of increasing humiliation. Always hysterically but less and less fiercely resisted, as one illusion after another fell away.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“And what was astrology? Astrology was the consecration of the homocentric universe. Astrology went further than saying that the stars were all about us. Astrology said that the stars were all about me.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
“Demi's linguistic quirk is essentially and definingly female. It just is. Drawing in breath to denounce this proposition, women will often come out with something like, "Up you!" or "Ballshit!" For I am referring to Demi's use of the conflated or mangled catchphrase--Demi's speech-bargains: she wanted two for the price of one. The result was expressive, and you usually knew what she meant, given the context.”
― Martin Amis, quote from The Information
Martin Amis
Born place: in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, The United Kingdom
Born date August 25, 1949
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“represented a certain ideal. It’s our attachment to an idealized relationship that is hard to let go of. If your friend lied to you, if your lover cheated on you, or if someone simply decided they didn’t want to be in a relationship with you anymore, they are not right for you. It may feel like they are, even though they hurt you, but they aren’t. You know who is right for you? The person who is everything you love about your ex, except for the part that hurt you. There are 7 billion people on the planet, and it’s naive and scientifically ridiculous to believe that such a person does not exist.”
― Lilly Singh, quote from How to Be a Bawse: A Guide to Conquering Life
“See that?”
“No.”
“Exactly. Earlier there was a big, huge food chunk right here.” She pointed at her front tooth. “And nobody told me. Nobody. Oh wait, Mark told me after I’d been talking to him for five minutes.”
I laughed.
“You would’ve told me, right? Tricia should have told me. It’s girl code. I think Tricia likes Mark, too. That’s the problem here.”
“Maybe she didn’t see the food.”
“Lil, people on the space station saw this chunk of food. It was massive. And right on my front tooth.”
“That was rude of the people on the space station not to tell you about it.”
“Ha-ha.”
― Kasie West, quote from P.S. I Like You
“Negroes were drafted, white men weren’t; the poor were hauled off to war, the rich weren’t; the stupid were shot at, the bright boys weren’t.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“No man can rob successfully over a period of years without pleasing the people he robs.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume II: Microcosmic God
“Things weren’t ever what they were supposed to be; they were what they were, and that was the simple truth of it, a truth that didn’t change just because you wanted it to.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Live by Night
Black and Blue
Bleeding Violet
Demon Lord of Karand...
The Humans
The Gone-Away World
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