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It is straightforward — and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

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
Existed
Atheist
Famines
Atheism
Plagues
Religion
Famine
Given
Straightforward
Mind
Cared
Never
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Humankind

More quotes by Martin Amis

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Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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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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Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.
Martin Amis
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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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Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.
Martin Amis
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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
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Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over.
Martin Amis
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Saul Bellow says, funny enough, what French think of your work is tremendously important. And it is. It's more than what the Italians, the Spanish, and the Germans think. Somehow it's still got that cultural primacy. I feel that too: to get praised in France is better than to get praised anywhere else.
Martin Amis
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Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is...to impress your personality on the road.
Martin Amis
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My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
Martin Amis
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The trouble with life is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending.
Martin Amis
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[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.
Martin Amis
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When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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Style is not neutral it gives moral directions.
Martin Amis
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My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.
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