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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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Martin Amis
Age: 75
Memoirist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Abertawe
Martin Louis Amis
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More quotes by Martin Amis

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No-one is going to sit down and read Bleak House to the family any more, but they can all huddle up happily in front of Charles Bronson.
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Style isn't something added on it's intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life.
Martin Amis
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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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It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
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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.
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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The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.
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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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But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.
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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It's a young country and a German only feels comfortable being with the masses. They have very little talent at creating an inner life, privacy. And I think there must be something wrong.
Martin Amis
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For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.
Martin Amis
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It's hard to make progress with grief.
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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When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.
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