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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
Injustices
Writing
Tend
Like
Novel
Partially
Already
Abuses
Changed
Corrected
Write
Dickens
Anything
Swift
Satirists
Ever
Injustice
Satirist
Great
Abuse

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Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is...to impress your personality on the road.
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Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
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There's Chile and there's Uruguay, and no one quite knows why Uruguay is so appealingly selfless because they've had their terror and their revolution like all the rest. But somehow, there's something in them.
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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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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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Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.
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No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.
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I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.
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When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.
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But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.
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I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.
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America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.
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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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It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.
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They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.
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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.
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We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.
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Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it's a funny thing, but I'm an exception to that rule.
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My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.
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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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