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

More quotes by Martin Amis

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How incredibly avaricious the whole operation was, the way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half price for children.... It was a kind of exploration of evil. Just how bad can we get?
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It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.
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My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.
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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.
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...So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answered everywhere you looked, in every headline and haircut: if, at any moment, nothing might matter, then who said that nothing didn't matter already?
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Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.
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Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
Martin Amis
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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.
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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The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.
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Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
Martin Amis
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My 12-year-old daughter said to me, Enough with the subtitles, Daddy, for crying out loud. Because they always seem to cloud the issue rather than clarify it.
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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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My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.
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It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.
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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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The Uruguayans have a sort of purity. I don't know where they got it, and I doubt even if they know from where they got it. Perhaps they didn't kill off their major population.
Martin Amis