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

More quotes by Martin Amis

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I would say I'm an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just turn up the volume dial. Which is a technique of science fiction, apart from anything else.
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You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.
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The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.
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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.
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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 life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
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The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over.
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Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief.
Martin Amis
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Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
Martin Amis
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I can imagine in a century or two that rule by women will be seen as a better bet than rule by men. What's wrong with men is that they tend to look for the violent solution. Women don't.
Martin Amis
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Has it ever happened to you...? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you're going to remember that moment for the rest of your life.
Martin Amis
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No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.
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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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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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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.
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Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.
Martin Amis