{"author":"Martin Amis","author_id":"Martin+Amis","total_quotes":42,"quotes":[{"text":"Belief is otiose reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands. ","author":"Martin Amis","tags":["atheism","awe","humanism","reality","religion"],"id":9789,"author_id":"Martin+Amis"},{"text":"Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.","author":"Martin Amis","tags":["love"],"id":25421,"author_id":"Martin+Amis"},{"text":"Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It’s not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence.","author":"Martin Amis","tags":["morality","style"],"id":30978,"author_id":"Martin+Amis"},{"text":"The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.","author":"Martin Amis","tags":["humor","inspirational","satire"],"id":33198,"author_id":"Martin+Amis"},{"text":"…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.","author":"Martin Amis","tags":["literature"],"id":33382,"author_id":"Martin+Amis"},{"text":"I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: 'Well. Shakespeare looked like shit.' It works wonders.","author":"Martin Amis","tags":["shakespeare"],"id":41300,"author_id":"Martin+Amis"},{"text":"My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.","author":"Martin Amis","tags":["life","paper","writing"],"id":48428,"author_id":"Martin+Amis"},{"text":"A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you get that with every novel, but more so when you write about these epics of human suffering. I felt that just as much when I wrote about the Gulag. Every writer knows what that is. The process goes… you have to think: ‘This novel I am writing is no good.’ Then you have to think: ‘All my novels are no good.’ And then, when you reach that point, you can begin.","author":"Martin Amis","tags":["writing-life","writing-process"],"id":52010,"author_id":"Martin+Amis"},{"text":"Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.","author":"Martin Amis","tags":["life","friends","road "],"id":62792,"author_id":"Martin+Amis"},{"text":"I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bare to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there's nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won't see any reason not to do you harm.","author":"Martin Amis","tags":["malevolence","reality","success"],"id":64066,"author_id":"Martin+Amis"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":42,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}