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It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.

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
Ideas
Leader
Arguable
Country
Democracy
Cleverest
Right
Middle
Divides
World
Point
Otherwise
Idea
Ancient
Stills
Average
America
Except
Still
Decided

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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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There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.
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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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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.
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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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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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America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.
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Weapons are like money no one knows the meaning of enough.
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When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.
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Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life
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When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
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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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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.
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I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.
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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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You use a different part of your heart with girls.
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Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.
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When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.
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I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.
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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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