One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction. I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled.
-- Martin Amis
The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.
-- Martin Amis
In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
-- Martin Amis
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
Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity.
-- Martin Amis
Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares— loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains.
-- Martin Amis
In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes— homosexuality, sexual disease, and death— about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.
-- Martin Amis
What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.
-- Martin Amis
The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.
-- Martin Amis
It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.
-- Martin Amis
Not greatly gifted, not deeply beautiful, Madonna tells America that fame comes from wanting it badly enough. And everyone is terribly good at badly wanting things.
-- Martin Amis
Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.
-- Martin Amis
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