British - Author | August 25, 1949 -
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
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.
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Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
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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 mind of the author.
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When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.
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