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Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.

Martin Amis

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Martin Amis
Age: 75
Memoirist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Abertawe
Martin Louis Amis
Humans
Curves
Novelists
Usual
Nine
Grinder
Follow
Arcs
Career
Stamina
Careers
Merchants
Human
Endeavour

More quotes by Martin Amis

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My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.
Martin Amis
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The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
Martin Amis
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So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.
Martin Amis
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As someone once said, covers to a novel are like bars to a cage. You can watch the tiger, the Komodo dragon, and admire it - its heart, its severity. Even when they carry out an ugly act, it's still fascinating.
Martin Amis
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Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.
Martin Amis
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Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.
Martin Amis
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Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
Martin Amis
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While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw--that of outright unreadability.
Martin Amis
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When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.
Martin Amis
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It's without doubt my main subject. The way masculinity can go wrong. And I'm something of a gynocrat in a utopian kind of way.
Martin Amis
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[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.
Martin Amis
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You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren't many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can't work.
Martin Amis
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No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.
Martin Amis
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When communism failed, it wasn't a good idea that had gone wrong, it was a bad idea that had been sustained with incredible determination in the face of all the commonsense arguments, and at the cost of 20 million lives at least, in Russia, to build the socialist Utopia.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
Martin Amis
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You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.
Martin Amis
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We all have names we don't know about.
Martin Amis