Martin Amis Quotes
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It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.
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They can't ban or burn Larkin's books. What they can embark on is the more genteel process of literary demotion.
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One wonders how the literary revisionists and canon cleansers can bear to take the money. Imagine a school of sixteenth century art criticism that spent its time contently jeering at the past for not knowing about perspective.
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Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.
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If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.
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Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.
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Sex has become much more competitive, with the girls becoming sort of predators as well. It's ferocious.
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Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.
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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.
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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.
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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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I think it's the whole impulse to judge and censor and euphemize, that is the enemy. … What fun, to feel superior to T. S. Eliot. And that's the impulse that I am suspicious of.
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I am secular to the bones, but not an atheist.
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All publicity isn't good publicity. As a New York publicist put it: 'What: the guy's an asshole so I'll go and buy his novel?'
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Laughter always forgives.
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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.
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Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.
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Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.
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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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The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.
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America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.
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People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
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What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything.
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Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.