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They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.

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
Done
Regret
Mean
Havens
Going
Haven
Always
Forward
Things
Places
Coming
Regretting
Looking
Hello
Back
Goodbye

More quotes by Martin Amis

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Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.
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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 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.
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So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.
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Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them... A religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
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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.
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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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In the concordance of Nicola Six's kisses there were many subheads and subsections, many genres and phyla - chapter and verse, cross-references, multiple citations.
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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.
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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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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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For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.
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Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.
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The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
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Style is not neutral it gives moral directions.
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Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.
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Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it's a funny thing, but I'm an exception to that rule.
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The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
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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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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