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America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.

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
Way
Break
Breaks
Makes
Generally
Spirit
Writers
Overpower
Hands
Tough
Drunken
Doe
Short
Deluded
America
Careers
Rendering
Feel
Proud
Tender
Feels
Dead
Spirits

More quotes by Martin Amis

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Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing.
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On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational -- to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.
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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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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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America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.
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It's tremendously important how you get on with the other sex. Your life record on that is incredibly important. You never really think about any of your other achievements.
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It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
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He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
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Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.
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If you want to know the real meaning of pornography, it is the utter dissociation of love and sex, the banishment of love from the sexual arena.
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Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
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When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.
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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.
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You use a different part of your heart with girls.
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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.
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But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.
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No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.
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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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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 you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
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