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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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Martin Amis
Age: 75
Memoirist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Abertawe
Martin Louis Amis
Characters
Without
Reader
Children
Fiction
Novelist
Mean
Principles
Novelists
Even
Pleasure
Admit
Much
Sound
Acknowledge
Love
Also
Sounds
Thinking
Principle
People
Character

More quotes by 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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It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.
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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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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Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
Martin Amis
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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.
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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Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.
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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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.
Martin Amis
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You get the feeling that childhood does not last as long as it used to. Innocence gets harder to hold on to as the world gets older, as it accumulates more experience, more mileage and more blood on the tracks.
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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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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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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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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Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.
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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Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.
Martin Amis
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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.
Martin Amis
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When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a long time before you can really say you're a writer. You've got to stand the test of time, which is the only real test there is.
Martin Amis