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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
Described
Early
Style
Words
Amis
Father
Kingsley
Mother
Paternal
Best
Lenient
Years
Minimalist

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Style isn't something added on it's intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life.
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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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When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.
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You use a different part of your heart with girls.
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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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When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.
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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.
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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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Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.
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The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.
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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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When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don't say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.
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Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
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Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.
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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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