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When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don't say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.

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
Well
Kinds
Many
Reader
Kind
Writer
Principles
Pleasure
Talk
Difficult
Wells
Principle

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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.
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He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
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When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.
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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.
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Weapons are like money no one knows the meaning of enough.
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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.
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I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.
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It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
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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.
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It's hard to make progress with grief.
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My 12-year-old daughter said to me, Enough with the subtitles, Daddy, for crying out loud. Because they always seem to cloud the issue rather than clarify it.
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All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.
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When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.
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My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
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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.
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Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life
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Amis is acutely, vibrantly sensitive to the different registers of laughter. He knows that it can be the most affirming and uniquely human sound, and also the most sinister and animalistic one. He understands every note of every octave that separates the liberating shout of mirth from the cackle of a bully or the snigger of a sadist.
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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.
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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.
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Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.
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