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Martin Amis
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Martin Amis
Age: 75
Memoirist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
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Abertawe
Martin Louis Amis
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More quotes by Martin Amis
Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
Martin Amis
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.
Martin Amis
Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.
Martin Amis
Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions.
Martin Amis
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.
Martin Amis
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
It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.
Martin Amis
Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.
Martin Amis
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.
Martin Amis
When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a long time before you can really say you're a writer. You've got to stand the test of time, which is the only real test there is.
Martin Amis
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
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.
Martin Amis
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.
Martin Amis
Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
Martin Amis
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.
Martin Amis
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
I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.
Martin Amis
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.
Martin Amis
Amis is acutely, vibrantly sensitive to the different registers of laughter. He knows that it can be the most affirming and uniquely human sound, and also the most sinister and animalistic one. He understands every note of every octave that separates the liberating shout of mirth from the cackle of a bully or the snigger of a sadist.
Martin Amis
Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.
Martin Amis