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All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.
Martin Amis -
In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
Martin Amis
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You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.
Martin Amis -
All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.
Martin Amis -
I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.
Martin Amis -
It occurs to you that Ulysses is about cliché. It is about inherited, ready-made formulations - most notably Irish Catholicism and anti-Semitism. After all, prejudices are clichés: they are secondhand hatreds . . . Joyce never uses a cliché in innocence.
Martin Amis -
I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.
Martin Amis -
One of the historical vulnerabilities of literature, as a subject for study, is that it has never seemed difficult enough. This may come as news to the buckled figure of the book reviewer, but it's true. Hence the various attempts to elevate it, complicate it, systematize it. Interacting with literature is easy.
Martin Amis
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The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.
Martin Amis -
It would be inaccurate to say that John Fowles is a middlebrow writer who sometimes hopes he is a highbrow: it has never occurred to him to believe otherwise. There is a difference, morally.
Martin Amis -
The doltish euphemism of conglomerate America.
Martin Amis -
Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
Martin Amis -
'Einstein's Monsters,' by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.
Martin Amis -
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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Watching an adaptation of your novel can be a violent experience: seeing your old jokes suddenly thrust at you can be alarming. But I started to enjoy 'Money' very quickly, and then I relaxed.
Martin Amis -
Does screen violence provide a window or a mirror? Is it an effect or a cause, an encouragement, a facilitation? Fairly representatively, I think, I happen to like screen violence while steadily execrating its real-life counterpart. Moreover, I can tell the difference between the two. One is happening, one is not.
Martin Amis -
Our vulgar delight in American vulgarity.
Martin Amis -
The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) 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 ...
Martin Amis -
Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.
Martin Amis -
The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
Martin Amis
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I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.
Martin Amis -
When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.
Martin Amis -
The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.
Martin Amis -
Saddam's hands-on years in the dungeons distinguish him from the other great dictators of the 20th century, none of whom had much taste for 'the wet stuff'. The mores of his regime have been shaped by this taste for the wet stuff - by a fascinated negative intimacy with the human body, and a connoisseurship of human pain.
Martin Amis