Martin Amis

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) 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 ...

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.

The driver treated his cab as a peasant might treat his horse or ass, with numb and proprietorial cruelty. The bursts of acceleration were like long-toothed, lip-flapping exhalations; then came the looping whinny of the brakes.

It was already obvious that every hard and demanding adaptation would be falling to the girls. Not to the boys — who were all like that anyway. The boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose.

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.

The only writer who gives me unfeigned pleasure is P. G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bit heavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown over Sunset at Blandings.

Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.

Of all the forces, love is the strangest. ... Love can make a woman pick up a bus, or it can crush a man under the weight of a feather. Or it just lets everything go on as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. That's the kind of force love is.

Pornographic sex is a kind of sex that can be described. Which told you something, he felt, about pornography, and about sex. During Keith's time, sex divorced itself from feeling. Pornography was the industrialization of that rift.

By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.

Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

You know, it's not the rich who're really different from us. It's the beautiful.