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Writer Quotes by Martin Amis

40 Writer quotes by Martin Amis

All Writer quotes Martin Amis’s page

Martin Amis argues that writers should celebrate the world and aim at their most discerning readers. He criticizes literary interviews for revealing a writer’s public persona rather than their true self. He also notes that novels rarely change history, while satirists target abuses and injustices.

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Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

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“Give the reader hell. Stretch the reader.”

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Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

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Often it doesn't occur to you what kind of novel you're writing until quite late on.

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Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.

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I think writers are excited by stupidity and bad behavior, generally.

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Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.

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I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write,

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Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to…

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When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the…

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Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be…

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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…

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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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“…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events,…

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“The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the…

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It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has…

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It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is…

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When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a…

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“…Here we come close to one of the definitions of literary fiction. Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight…

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Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that…

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The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's…

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“What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they,…

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Well, my father Kingsley Amis was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it…

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“A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel…

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What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near…

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“Some junk novels were all about airports. Some junk novels were even called things like Airport. Why, then you might ask, was…

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Steven Pinker says, the invention of printing and the widespread appearance of fiction - this taught empathy. If you read a novel,…

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“Literature...describes a descent. First, gods. Then demigods. Then epic became tragedy: failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class…

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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…

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What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near…

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All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside,…

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I think all writers have a bit of genius in them, and a bit of talent. Genius retreats but talent improves.

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I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel,…

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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…

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Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which…

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We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia,…

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When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a…

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I sometimes feel I'm a sort of cult writer, rather than a mainstream writer, in that those who like my stuff like…

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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…

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Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life…

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More by Martin Amis

“Yeah,' I said and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.”

“barrios; each barrio has two or three gangs, and all the gangs are theoretically”

I'm not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I'm 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle - that's what…

“If we all downed tools and joined hands for ten minutes and stopped believing in money, then money would no longer exist. We never…

When I see a lot of young faces in the audience, it's just sort of sinking in how important that is. Because you're old…

“I was informed by my viscera that now was the time to put my arm around her shoulders. I ignored them.”

You use a different part of your heart with girls.

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all…

In her final months Princess Diana was being shat upon by the tabloids -- basically for sleeping with an Arab. When she died, these…

If you feel you have a strong constituency among the young, you can really die happy, because the great unanswered question, the only valid…

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

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…

The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice…

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

“There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics [notably the lower clergy] for…