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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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Martin Amis
Age: 75
Memoirist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Abertawe
Martin Louis Amis
Also
Riveting
America
Signifies
Mean
Obliged
Never
Hence
Vulnerability
Content
Illusion
Constant

More quotes by Martin Amis

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Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.
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It's often said of American politics that it's a huge juggernaut and the president can change the direction by two or three degrees in either direction, but not much more. In fact, I think the president's power is limited, much more than the prime minister in England.
Martin Amis
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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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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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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.
Martin Amis
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I think a lot of people who read fiction are interested in subtlety. But they wouldn't like my stuff. It's a bit too violent for many tastes.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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I'm not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I'm 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle - that's what fiction is, and should be.
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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I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.
Martin Amis
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You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.
Martin Amis
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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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...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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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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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.
Martin Amis
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The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.
Martin Amis
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Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.
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
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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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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