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Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.

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
Inoffensive
Addictions
Twin
Twins
Offended
Addiction
Culture

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If you want to know the real meaning of pornography, it is the utter dissociation of love and sex, the banishment of love from the sexual arena.
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Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.
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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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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.
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The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.
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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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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.
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On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational -- to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.
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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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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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It's good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don't know what he's going to do - I have to find my way.
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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.
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Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.
Martin Amis
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It's tremendously important how you get on with the other sex. Your life record on that is incredibly important. You never really think about any of your other achievements.
Martin Amis
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Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
Martin Amis
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So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.
Martin Amis
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How incredibly avaricious the whole operation was, the way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half price for children.... It was a kind of exploration of evil. Just how bad can we get?
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.
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No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over.
Martin Amis