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I think a lot of people who read fiction are interested in subtlety. But they wouldn't like my stuff. It's a bit too violent for many tastes.

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
Stuff
Tastes
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Violent
Think
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Subtlety

More quotes by Martin Amis

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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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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.
Martin Amis
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Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.
Martin Amis
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Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
Martin Amis
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The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
Martin Amis
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It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.
Martin Amis
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My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.
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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I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.
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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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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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.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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It's hard to make progress with grief.
Martin Amis
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It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
Martin Amis
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In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
Martin Amis
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Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.
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While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw--that of outright unreadability.
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