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I'm not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I'm 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle - that's what fiction is, and should be.

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
Principles
Diagnostic
Pleasure
Principle
Making
Committed
Concern
Interested
Percent
Novel
Fiction

More quotes by Martin Amis

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You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren't many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can't work.
Martin Amis
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Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I'm too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.
Martin Amis
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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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Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.
Martin Amis
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My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.
Martin Amis
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If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.
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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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.
Martin Amis
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When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable
Martin Amis
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Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief.
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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The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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There's a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer's views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.
Martin Amis
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It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.
Martin Amis
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My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
Martin Amis
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If you want to know the real meaning of pornography, it is the utter dissociation of love and sex, the banishment of love from the sexual arena.
Martin Amis