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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.

Martin Amis

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Martin Amis
Age: 75
Memoirist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
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Abertawe
Martin Louis Amis
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He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
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It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
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You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks.
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Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.
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Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life
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I'm not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I'm 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle - that's what fiction is, and should be.
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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.
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There's Chile and there's Uruguay, and no one quite knows why Uruguay is so appealingly selfless because they've had their terror and their revolution like all the rest. But somehow, there's something in them.
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I would say I'm an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just turn up the volume dial. Which is a technique of science fiction, apart from anything else.
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I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.
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The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.
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Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I'm too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.
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It's often said of American politics that it's a huge juggernaut and the president can change the direction by two or three degrees in either direction, but not much more. In fact, I think the president's power is limited, much more than the prime minister in England.
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Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.
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Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them... A religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
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Has it ever happened to you...? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you're going to remember that moment for the rest of your life.
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I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.
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We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.
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We hear about the successful Texanisation of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?
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Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.
Martin Amis