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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

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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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Partially
Already
Abuses
Changed
Corrected
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Dickens
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Injustice
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Injustices

More quotes by Martin Amis

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When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.
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.
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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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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 afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.
Martin Amis
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When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don't say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.
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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?
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There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.
Martin Amis
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Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.
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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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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.
Martin Amis
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[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.
Martin Amis
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While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw--that of outright unreadability.
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Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.
Martin Amis
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We all have names we don't know about.
Martin Amis
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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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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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The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.
Martin Amis
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My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
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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