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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.

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
Much
Subtraction
Way
Talents
Powers
Talent
Goes
Getting
Faith
Writing

More quotes by Martin Amis

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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.
Martin Amis
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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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America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.
Martin Amis
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Weapons are like money no one knows the meaning of enough.
Martin Amis
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When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.
Martin Amis
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I don't think I'd like Manhattan anymore. My mother-in-law lives there, and you go there. But I like looking at it from a distance. It's a fantastic sight - every time, it awes me.
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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Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
Martin Amis
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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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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.
Martin Amis
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Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.
Martin Amis
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It's without doubt my main subject. The way masculinity can go wrong. And I'm something of a gynocrat in a utopian kind of way.
Martin Amis
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It's hard to make progress with grief.
Martin Amis
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No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.
Martin Amis
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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.
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