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The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.

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
Manipulator
Manipulating
Reputation
True
Never

More quotes by Martin Amis

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I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.
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Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.
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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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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.
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In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
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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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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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Amis is acutely, vibrantly sensitive to the different registers of laughter. He knows that it can be the most affirming and uniquely human sound, and also the most sinister and animalistic one. He understands every note of every octave that separates the liberating shout of mirth from the cackle of a bully or the snigger of a sadist.
Martin Amis
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Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions.
Martin Amis
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When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a long time before you can really say you're a writer. You've got to stand the test of time, which is the only real test there is.
Martin Amis
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When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.
Martin Amis
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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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America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.
Martin Amis
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When I see a lot of young faces in the audience, it's just sort of sinking in how important that is. Because you're old enough now to identify them very strongly as being young - whereas before, of course they were young, because you were young. Now it's not like that.
Martin Amis
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You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren't many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can't work.
Martin Amis
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When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
Martin Amis
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At its grandest, political correctness is an attempt to accelerate evolution.
Martin Amis
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It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.
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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I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.
Martin Amis