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Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.

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
Fall
Briefly
Live
Impression
Firsts
Apart
First
Chaos
Work
Writers
Things
Among
Probably
Forefront
Point
Disintegration

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Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
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Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions.
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Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.
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You use a different part of your heart with girls.
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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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There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.
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The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.
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It's good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don't know what he's going to do - I have to find my way.
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Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life
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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.
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You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.
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Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.
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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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If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.
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I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.
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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.
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I think a lot of people who read fiction are interested in subtlety. But they wouldn't like my stuff. It's a bit too violent for many tastes.
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Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
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The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.
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It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.
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