"It's not that you get a cliché and……" — Martin Amis
"It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me."
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Martin Amis
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123 Quotes by Martin Amis
Martin Amis has 123 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and…
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Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.
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Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an…
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When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral…
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Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.
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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…
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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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Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.
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Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark -…
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One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going…
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Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
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More will mean worse.
See all 123 quotes by Martin Amis »
More Clich Quotes
This quote is filed under Clich Quotes,
one of 112 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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The cliché organizes life; it expropriates people's identity; it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.
— Vaclav Havel
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The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is…
— H. L. Mencken
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The only valid reason to use clichés is in the speech of a character. Cliches are indications of sloppy writing.…
— Leonard Bishop
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Mathematics is not a deductive science-that's a cliché. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the…
— Paul Halmos
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What a story that would make! How many men and women go through the same rivers, menaced by the same…
— Richard Bach
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No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make…
— W. Somerset Maugham
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Beware of clichés. Not just the clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as…
— Geoff Dyer
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My commodity as a writer, whatever I'm writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don't alter your voice…
— William Zinsser
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Cliché openings in fantasy can include an opening scene set in a battle (and my peeve is that I don’t…
— Kristin Nelson
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You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say,…
— Philip Seymour Hoffman
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Many forms, sizes and colors, I think there are heroes in sports, in life...It would be cliché to say my…
— George Eads
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One of the reasons why language is so sick right now and cliché-ridden and lame and boring and laid-out, and…
— Edward Dorn
See all 112 Clich Quotes »