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We hear about the successful Texanisation of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?

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
House
Heat
Saudi
Doesn
Worship
Resemble
Seems
Republican
Saudis
Country
Seem
Arabia
Sometimes
Wealth
Execution
Great
Hear
Houses
Executions
Like
Successful
Texas
Brimming
Party
Oil
Weekly

More quotes by 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.
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Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.
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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.
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When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
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The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.
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I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.
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No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.
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The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
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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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It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
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I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.
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Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.
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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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Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it's a funny thing, but I'm an exception to that rule.
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There's a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer's views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.
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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.
Martin Amis
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Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.
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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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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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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.
Martin Amis