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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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Martin Amis
Age: 75
Memoirist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Abertawe
Martin Louis Amis
Mother
Paternal
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Lenient
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Minimalist
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Amis
Father
Kingsley

More quotes by 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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The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.
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But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.
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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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I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.
Martin Amis
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I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.
Martin Amis
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I would say I'm an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just turn up the volume dial. Which is a technique of science fiction, apart from anything else.
Martin Amis
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It's hard to make progress with grief.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.
Martin Amis
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Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
Martin Amis
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No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.
Martin Amis
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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?
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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Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
Martin Amis
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When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.
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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He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis