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The Uruguayans have a sort of purity. I don't know where they got it, and I doubt even if they know from where they got it. Perhaps they didn't kill off their major population.

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
Population
Kill
Perhaps
Doubt
Sort
Didn
Even
Purity
Major

More quotes by Martin Amis

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How incredibly avaricious the whole operation was, the way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half price for children.... It was a kind of exploration of evil. Just how bad can we get?
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Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
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Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
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...So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answered everywhere you looked, in every headline and haircut: if, at any moment, nothing might matter, then who said that nothing didn't matter already?
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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.
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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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Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.
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My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.
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Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
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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.
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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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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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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.
Martin Amis
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When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
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The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.
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Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
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The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.
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Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.
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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.
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