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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

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Martin Amis
Age: 75
Memoirist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Abertawe
Martin Louis Amis
Twice
Second
Writer
Maugham
Novel
Somerset
Firsts
Incidentally
First
Award
Time
Awards
Received

More quotes by Martin Amis

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You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks.
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At its grandest, political correctness is an attempt to accelerate evolution.
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When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.
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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.
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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.
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It's a young country and a German only feels comfortable being with the masses. They have very little talent at creating an inner life, privacy. And I think there must be something wrong.
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I can imagine in a century or two that rule by women will be seen as a better bet than rule by men. What's wrong with men is that they tend to look for the violent solution. Women don't.
Martin Amis
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Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
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America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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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
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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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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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It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
Martin Amis
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While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw--that of outright unreadability.
Martin Amis
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Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
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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There's Chile and there's Uruguay, and no one quite knows why Uruguay is so appealingly selfless because they've had their terror and their revolution like all the rest. But somehow, there's something in them.
Martin Amis
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Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis