A biography for Martin Amishasn’t been written yet.
“Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.”
“When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.”
“He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.”
“It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.”
“Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.”
“It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.”
“Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.”
“No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.”
“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.”
“All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.”
“Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness.”
“You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.”
“When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable”
“The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.”
“How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist’s couch or even the lovers’ bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.”
“Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.”
“Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.”
“Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.”
“The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.”
“Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.”