Martin Amis Quotes

I have to believe that literature can effect change; otherwise, I would have no purpose in my life and would have wasted four years on 'Ilustrado.'

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.

I'm not a comedian. And I'm not sick. The world is sick, and I'm the doctor. I'm a surgeon with a scalpel for false values.

Our country's social revolution lends itself to jokes and I use them.

To feel that literature has any politically redemptive power at all just seems increasingly naive.

I think of myself as a comedian who has the pleasure of writing jokes about things that I actually care about, and that's really it. I have great respect for people who are in the front lines and the trenches of trying to enact social change, but I am far lazier than that.

Satire that is seasonable and just is often more effectual than law or gospel.

It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.

It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch.

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.

Literature is a form of permanent insurrection. Its mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a constant state of dissatisfaction with themselves.

The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice. The proof of that is the ability of a dictator to snuff out the life of a writer.

Movements are not radical. Movements are the American way. A small group of abolitionists writing and speaking eventually led to the end of slavery. A few stirred-up women brought about women's voting. The Populist movement, the Progressive movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women's movement - the examples go on and on of 'little people' getting together and telling the truth about their lives. They made our government act.

I think we're ripe for social revolution now. There is the necessary yearning, and the necessary, or at least incipient, outrage. And there is an inchoate knowing that all is not right.

I'm not trying to write a bleak and blistering screed against American civilization. I'm writing something that I hope is fun and satirical and full of possibility.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.

In the present state of the world it is difficult not to write lampoons.

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.

My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I think we've seen at least the beginnings of rather significant social and economic change in the Muslim world, which I think will in due course lead to more political change.

It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol.

We need to do more than just what is right. We need to join together and right what is wrong.

I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.

Why do so many ingenious theorists give fresh reasons every year for the decline of letter writing, and why do they assume, in derision of suffering humanity, that it has declined? They lament the lack of leisure, the lack of sentiment ... They talk of telegrams, and telephones, and postal cards, as if any discovery of science, any device of civilization, could eradicate from the human heart that passion for self-expression which is the impelling force of letters.