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Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.

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
Goals
Usurped
Poetry
Gluttony
Goal
Sloth
Free
Avarice
Together
Consumed
Time
Quietly
Worldly
Lust

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Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing.
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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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Style is not neutral it gives moral directions.
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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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In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
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Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.
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My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.
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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.
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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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Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.
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Weapons are like money no one knows the meaning of enough.
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The Uruguayans have a sort of purity. I don't know where they got it, and I doubt even if they know from where they got it. Perhaps they didn't kill off their major population.
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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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The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.
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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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We all have names we don't know about.
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Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.
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It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.
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So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.
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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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