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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.
-Martin Amis
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America Has Had Much

Martin Amis
...
America Has Had Much More Respect For Its Writers Because They Had To Define What America Was. America Wasn't Sure What It Was.

Understanding the Quote: "america has had much more respect for its writers because they had..."

This quote by Martin Amis reflects deeply on the theme of america. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under America, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Martin Amis interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Martin Amis

Martin Amis is celebrated for insightful thoughts on america and motivation. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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America
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One Of The Many Things I Do Not Understand About Americans Is This: What Is It Like To Be A Citizen Of A Superpower, To Maintain Democratically The Means Of Planetary Extinction. I Wonder How This Contributes To The Dreamlife Of America, A Dreamlife That Is So Deep And Troubled.
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Blind
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Years
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Night
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Country
Self
America
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Sometimes
Mainstream
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Alarms
Usual
Six
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Islam
Christianity
Medieval
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People
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I Think Novelists Are In The Education Business, Really, But They're Not Teaching You Times Tables, They Are Teaching You Responsiveness And Morality And To Make Nuanced Judgments. And Really To Just Make The Planet Look A Bit Richer When You Go Out Into The Street.
Teaching
Thinking
Novelists
Saul Bellow Says, Funny Enough, What French Think Of Your Work Is Tremendously Important. And It Is. It's More Than What The Italians, The Spanish, And The Germans Think. Somehow It's Still Got That Cultural Primacy. I Feel That Too: To Get Praised In France Is Better Than To Get Praised Anywhere Else.
Thinking
Important
Enough
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Defense
Nuclear
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Retreat
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Way
Talent
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Color
Shadow
Rest Of Your Life
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Fighting
Aggressors
Money Doesn't Mind If We Say It's Evil, It Goes From Strength To Strength. It's A Fiction, An Addiction, And A Tacit Conspiracy.
Evil
Addiction
Mind
When The Past Is Forgotten, The Present Is Unforgettable
Past
Forgotten
Unforgettable
In Germany, They Were Very Interested In Talking About Their Past. I Respect That, And I Think They've Done Quite Well. It's Become A Kind Of Obsession, As It Bloody Well Should, When Compared, For Example, To France, Which Hasn't Done Anything. France Has Done No Work About Their Part In Transporting Eighty Thousand People To Their Deaths. They Are Still The Guy In The Leather Jacket With The Onion, Who's A Part Of La Résistance. In Fact, They Collaborated, Not Resisted.
Past
Thinking
People
Fiction Is The Only Way To Redeem The Formlessness Of Life
Fiction
Way
You Get The Feeling That Childhood Does Not Last As Long As It Used To. Innocence Gets Harder To Hold On To As The World Gets Older, As It Accumulates More Experience, More Mileage And More Blood On The Tracks.
Blood
Long
Track
When I Hear About Some Sensational New Writer I Sort Of Think, Shut Up ... You've Got To Be Around For A Long Time Before You Can Really Say You're A Writer. You've Got To Stand The Test Of Time, Which Is The Only Real Test There Is.
Real
Thinking
Long
It Sounds Schmaltzy To Say, But Fiction Is Much More To Do With Love Than People Admit Or Acknowledge. The Novelist Has To Not Only Love His Characters - Which You Do, Without Even Thinking About It, Just As You Love Your Children. But Also To Love The Reader, And That's What I Mean By The Pleasure Principle.
Children
Love You
Character
It Seems To Me That You Need A Lot Of Courage, Or A Lot Of Something, To Enter Into Others, Into Other People. We All Think That Everyone Else Lives In Fortresses, In Fastnesses: Behind Moats, Behind Sheer Walls Studded With Spikes And Broken Glass. But In Fact We Inhabit Much Punier Structures. We Are, As It Turns Out, All Jerry-built. Or Not Even. You Can Just Stick Your Head Under The Flap Of The Tent And Crawl Right In. If You Get The Okay.
Wall
Thinking
Glasses
Everyone Is Right Up There At The Very Brink Of Their Pain Limit.
Pain
Limits
It Is Quite An Achievement. People Of Liberal Sympathies, Stupefied By Relativism, Have Become The Apologists For A Creedal Wave That Is Racist, Misogynist, Homophobic, Imperialist, And Genocidal. To Put It Another Way, They Are Up The Arse Of Those That Want Them Dead.
People
Achievement
Arses
Insects Are What Neurosis Would Sound Like, If Neurosis Could Make A Noise With Its Nose.
Sound
Noses
Neurosis
Every Writer Hopes Or Boldly Assumes That His Life Is In Some Sense Exemplary, That The Particular Will Turn Out To Be Universal.
Writing
Assuming
Life Is
Probably Human Cruelty Is Fixed And Eternal. Only Styles Change.
Style
Fixed
Cruelty
I Always Do My Draft In Long Hand Because Even The Ink Is Part Of The Flow.
Writing
Hands
Long
So I Am Lonely, But Not Alone, Like Everybody Else.
Lonely
I Am Lonely
Not Alone
September 11 Was A Day Of De-enlightenment. Politics Stood Revealed As A Veritable Walpurgis Night Of The Irrational. And Such Old, Old Stuff. The Conflicts We Now Face Or Fear Involve Opposed Geographical Arenas, But Also Opposed Centuries Or Even Millennia. It Is A Landscape Of Ferocious Anachronisms: Nuclear Jihad In The Indian Subcontinent; The Medieval Agonism Of Islam; The Bronze Age Blunderings Of The Middle East.
Night
September 11
Islam
Seeing The World Anew, As If It Were New, Is As Old As Writing. It's What All Painters Are Trying To Do, To See What's There, To See It In A Way That Renews It. It Becomes More And More Urgent As The Planet Gets Worn Flat And Forest After Forest Is Slain To Print The Paper For People's Impressions To Be Scrawled Down On. It Becomes Harder And Harder To Be Original, To See Things With An Innocent Eye. Innocence Is Much Tied Up With It. As The Planet Gets Progressively Less Innocent, You Need A More Innocent Eye To See It.
Writing
Eye
People
I Say The Sentences Again And Again In My Head Until They Sound Right.
Writing
Sound
Again And Again
I Don't Think I'd Like Manhattan Anymore. My Mother-in-law Lives There, And You Go There. But I Like Looking At It From A Distance. It's A Fantastic Sight - Every Time, It Awes Me.
Mother
Distance
Thinking
The Thing Is That I Am A Member Of That Sad, Ever-dwindling Minority... The Child Of An Unbroken Home. I Have Carried This Albatross Since The Age Of Eleven, When I Started At Grammar School. Not A Day Would Pass Without Somebody I Knew Turning Out To Be Adopted Or Illegitimate, Or To Have Mothers Who Were About To Hare Off With Some Bloke, Or To Have Dead Fathers And Shabby Stepfathers. What Busy Lives They Led. How I Envied Their Excuses For Introspection, Their Ear-marked Receptacles For Every Just Antagonism And Noble Loyalty.
Loyalty
Mother
Children
As Someone Once Said, Covers To A Novel Are Like Bars To A Cage. You Can Watch The Tiger, The Komodo Dragon, And Admire It - Its Heart, Its Severity. Even When They Carry Out An Ugly Act, It's Still Fascinating.
Heart
Ugly
Admire
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.
Block
Writing
Sound
I Think Writers Are Excited By Stupidity And Bad Behavior, Generally.
Thinking
Stupidity
Excited
Love Might Have Expanded Her. But We Are Not All Of Us Going To Get Loved. We Are Not All Of Us Going To Get Expanded.
Might
All The Things We Value In Society Don't Mean Much In Fiction.
Mean
Fiction
Values
When Policemen Go To Prison In England, They Have As Bad A Time As A Pedophile.
England
Prison
Policemen
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 And Stick To The Present. It's The Real Stuff, The Only Stuff, It's All There Is, The Present, The Panting Present.
Real
Advice
Stuff
They Did More Than Take Our Youth Away. They Also Took Away The Men We Were Going To Be.
Men
Youth
It Is Very Difficult, It Is Perhaps Impossible, For Someone Who Loves His Mother To Love The Woman Whom Your Father Left Her For.
Mother
Father
Impossible
I'm Afraid The Negative Things Are Always The Great Subjects. Failure Is Much More Interesting Than Success.
Interesting
Negative
Subjects
All My Adult Life I Have Been Searching For The Right Adjective To Describe My Father's Peculiarly Aggressive Comic Style. I Recently Settled On 'defamatory.
Father
Style
Adults
One Thing You Can't Help Noticing In South America And In Latin Culture, Generally, Is How Nice People Are. Although When I Went Back To Spain - My Mother Lived In Spain And Both My Brothers Lived There - After The Uruguay Trip, I Thought, "oh Great, Hispanic People." But They Weren't Nearly As Nice As The Uruguayans. They're Quite Proud And Pissed Off, The Spaniards.
Mother
Brother
Latin
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 Enough Now To Identify Them Very Strongly As Being Young - Whereas Before, Of Course They Were Young, Because You Were Young. Now It's Not Like That.
Important
Faces
Enough
It's Tremendously Important How You Get On With The Other Sex. Your Life Record On That Is Incredibly Important. You Never Really Think About Any Of Your Other Achievements.
Sex
Thinking
Achievement
You See Tragedy Requires Persons Of Heroic Stature. It Works On The Principle Of People Being More Than Humansuper-humanand Also Being Only Too Human. But There Just Aren't Many Great Figures Around Now, So The Tragic Mechanisms Can't Work.
People
Tragedy
Principles
Gluttony And Sloth, As Worldly Goals, Were Quietly Usurped By Avarice And Lust, Which, Together With Poetry (yes, Poetry), Consumed All My Free Time.
Goal
Lust
Sloth
Style Isn't Something Added On; It's Intrinsic To The Perceptions And The Way You See Life.
Perception
Style
Way
Oh Man Sometimes I Wake Up Feel Like A Cat Runover. Are You Familiar With The Stoical Aspects Of Hard Drinking, Of Heavy Drinking? Oh It's Heavy. Oh It's Hard. It Isn't Easy. Jesus, I Never Meant Me Any Harm. All I Wanted Was A Good Time.
Jesus
Drinking
Cat
What Did Nabokov And Joyce Have In Common, Apart From The Poor Teeth And The Great Prose? Exile, And Decades Of Near Pauperism. A Compulsive Tendency To Overtip. An Uxoriousness That Their Wives Deservedly Inspired. More Than That, They Both Lived Their Lives 'beautifully'--not In Any Jamesian Sense (where, Besides, Ferocious Solvency Would Have Been A Prerequisite), But In The Droll Fortitude Of Their Perseverance. They Got The Work Done, With Style.
Perseverance
Wife
Style
The Only Writer Who Gives Me Unfeigned Pleasure Is P.g. Wodehouse. And Even Him I Find A Bit Heavy. He Takes A Lot Out Of Me. Scratching My Hair, With Soft Whistles, With Lips Aquiver, I Frown Over Sunset At Blandings.
Sunset
Hair
Giving
Since It Is No Longer Permissible To Disparage Any Single Faith Or Creed, Let Us Start Disparaging All Of Them... A Religion Is A Belief System With No Basis In Reality Whatever. Religious Belief Is Without Reason And Without Dignity, And Its Record Is Near-universally Dreadful.
Religious
Reality
Atheism
In Her Final Months Princess Diana Was Being Shat Upon By The Tabloids -- Basically For Sleeping With An Arab. When She Died, These Same Papers Were Astonished By The Millennial Wave Of Emotionalism That Swept The Country ... One Paper Had A Print-ready Story About What A Slag The Princess Was, And They Had To Pull It At The Last Moment. It Was Replaced With An Image Of Diana As An Angel, Ascending To Heaven.
Country
Princess
Sleep
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.
Humor
Common Sense
Serious
When It Comes To Flying, I Am A Nervous Passenger But A Confident Drinker And Valium-swallower.
Flying
Aviation
Nervous
The First Thing That Distinguishes A Writer Is That He Is Most Alive When Alone.
Alive
Firsts
I Am Easily Moved To Tears And Rarely Survive A Visit To The Cinema Without Shedding Them, Racked, As I Am, By The Most Perfunctory, Meretricious Or Even Callously Sentimental Attempts At Poignancy (something About The Exterior Of The Human Face, So Vast And Palpable, With The Eyes And The Lips: It Is All Writ Too Large For Me, Too Immediate For Me.)
Eye
Tears
Cinema
No Novel Has Ever Changed Anything, As Far As I Can See. And The Great Satirists, Like Swift And Dickens, Tend To Write About Abuses And Injustices That Have Already Been Partially Corrected - You Write About It After It's Over.
Writing
Abuse
Injustice
When I Hear About Some Sensational New Writer I Sort Of Think, Shut Up ... You've Got To Be Around For A Long Time Before You Can Really Say You're A Writer. You've Got To Stand The Test Of Time, Which Is The Only Real Test There Is.
Real
Thinking
Long
You Can't Sort Of Write The Novel As If You're Taking Dictation From Heaven.
Writing
Heaven
Novel
For Myself And My Loved Ones, I Want The Heat, Which Comes At The Speed Of Light. I Don't Want To Have To Hang About For The Blast, Which Idles Along At The Speed Of Sound.
Light
Sound
Want
Novelists Don't Age As Quickly As Philosophers, Who Often Face Professional Senility In Their Late Twenties.
Age
Twenties
Novelists
The Air Itself Was Ebony, Like The Denial, The Refutation, Of The Idea Of Light.
Light
Air
Ideas
Perhaps There Are Other Bits Of My Life That Would Take On Content, Take On Shadow, If Only I Read More And Thought Less About Money.
Shadow
Bits
Ifs
America Is A Younger Country Than England, Obviously, And As Self-awareness Is Forming In America - Are We A Collection Of Immigrants, Are We A Load Of Italians And Germans And Jews And Brits And Irish, Or Are We A Country With A Soul And An Identity? - There Was A Subliminal Sense, They Knew That The Writers Would Be The Ones Who Would Answer Those Questions.
Country
Self
America
When It Comes To Flying, I Am A Nervous Passenger But A Confident Drinker And Valium-swallower.
Flying
Aviation
Nervous
We Live In The Age Of Mass Loquacity.we Are All Writing It Or At Any Rate Talking It: The Memoir, The Apologia, The C.v., The Cri De Coeur.
Writing
Talking
Age
I Would Say I'm An Ironist Not A Satirist. All You Do Is You Take Existing Tendencies And Crank Them Up, Just Turn Up The Volume Dial. Which Is A Technique Of Science Fiction, Apart From Anything Else.
Technique
Fiction
Crank
This (writing) Is The Love Of Your Life. It's What I Want To Do When I Wake Up. Nothing Feels So Absorbing, So Fulfilling.
Writing
Wake Up
Want
As Someone Once Said, Covers To A Novel Are Like Bars To A Cage. You Can Watch The Tiger, The Komodo Dragon, And Admire It - Its Heart, Its Severity. Even When They Carry Out An Ugly Act, It's Still Fascinating.
Heart
Ugly
Admire
We All Have Names We Don't Know About.
Names
Knows
Screw-top Wine Has Improved The Quality Of Life By About Ten Percent, Wouldn't You Say?
Wine
Quality
Screws
All Novelists Write In A Different Way, But I Always Write In Longhand And Then Do Two Versions Of Typescript On A Computer.
Writing
Two
Novelists
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.
Interviews
People? People Are Chaotic Quiddities Living In One Cave Each. They Pass The Hours In Amorous Grudge And Playback And Thought Experiment. At The Campfire They Put The Usual Fraction On Exhibit, And Listen To Their Own Silent Gibber About How They're Feeling And How They're Going Down. We've Been There. Death Helps. Death Gives Us Something To Do. Because It's A Fulltime Job Looking The Other Way.
Jobs
People
Giving
While Making Love, We Often Talk About Money. I Like It. I Like That Dirty Talk
Dirty
Making Love
Dirty Talk
I Would Say That The Writers I Like And Trust Have At The Base Of Their Prose Something Called The English Sentence. An Awful Lot Of Modern Writing Seems To Me To Be A Depressed Use Of Language. Once, I Called It "vow-of-poverty Prose." No, Give Me The King In His Countinghouse. Give Me Updike.
Kings
Writing
Giving
If You Feel You Have A Strong Constituency Among The Young, You Can Really Die Happy, Because The Great Unanswered Question, The Only Valid Value Judgment Is Whether You're Going To Last, And That Tells You That You Are, For A Bit At Least.
Strong
Unanswered Questions
Lasts
There's Chile And There's Uruguay, And No One Quite Knows Why Uruguay Is So Appealingly Selfless Because They've Had Their Terror And Their Revolution Like All The Rest. But Somehow, There's Something In Them.
Selfless
Revolution
Terror
...so In His Own Way Guy Clinch Confronted The Central Question Of His Time, A Question You Saw Being Asked And Answered Everywhere You Looked, In Every Headline And Haircut: If, At Any Moment, Nothing Might Matter, Then Who Said That Nothing Didn't Matter Already?
Guy
Might
Matter
Has It Ever Happened To You...? The Color Of The Day Suddenly Changes To Shadow. And You Know You're Going To Remember That Moment For The Rest Of Your Life.
Color
Shadow
Rest Of Your Life
I Had My Yob Periods. Nothing Violent But Certainly Loutish. I Think It's Frustrated Intelligence. Imagine That If You Were Really Intelligent And Everyone Treated You As Though You Were Stupid And No One Tried To Teach You Anything -- The Sort Of Deep Subliminal Rage That Would Get Going In You. But Then Once It Gets Going, You Make A Strength Out Of What You Know Is Your Weakness, Which Is That You Are Undeveloped.
Stupid
Intelligent
Thinking
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.
Mother
Father
Years
There's A Lot Of Anti-intellectualism In Britain. And The Writer's Views On This Or That Are Really Of Less Importance, As They See It, Than That Of The Man In The Street.
Men
Views
He Man
Addictions Do Come In Handy Sometimes: At Least You Have To Get Out Of Bed For Them.
Addiction
Bed
Sometimes
If You Want To Know The Real Meaning Of Pornography, It Is The Utter Dissociation Of Love And Sex, The Banishment Of Love From The Sexual Arena.
Sex
Real
Want
So If You Ever Felt Something Behind You, When You Weren't Even One, Like Welcome Heat, Like A Bulb, Like A Sun, Trying To Shine Right Across The Universe - It Was Me. Always Me. It Was Me. It Was Me.
Shining
Trying
Across The Universe
It's Tremendously Important How You Get On With The Other Sex. Your Life Record On That Is Incredibly Important. You Never Really Think About Any Of Your Other Achievements.
Sex
Thinking
Achievement
Sex Is Hard To Write About Because You Lose The Universal And Succumb To The Particular. We All Have Our Different Favorites. Good Sex Is Impossible To Write About. Lawrence And Updike Have Given It Their All, And The Result Is Still Uneasy And Unsure. It May Be That Good Sex Is Something Fiction Just Can't Do - Like Dreams. Most Of The Sex In My Novels Is Absolutely Disastrous. Sex Can Be Funny, But Not Very Sexy.
Sexy
Dream
Writing
Because We Are All Poets Or Babies In The Middle Of The Night, Struggling With Being.
Baby
Struggle
Night
Egotism Exists Everywhere, But It Has A Different Flavor In England, Where The Tabloid Culture Goes Much Deeper. It's Just The Indulgence Of Vulgarity, The Wallowing In Vulgarity. As With Everything English, There's A Sort Of Irony To It. They Write A Great Deal About These Trivial People Who Have A Certain Eminence, Always With A Bit Of, "isn't It Ridiculous That We Are Writing About This Person?"
Writing
People
Different
You Can't Be Up The Reader's Ass, As Many A Writer I Think Is - Cute As Hell, Ingratiating As Hell. But That's Not Loving The Reader In The Right Way. That's Toadying To The Reader.
Cute
Thinking
Way
The Champions Of Militant Islam Are, Of Course, Misogynists, Woman-haters; They Are Also Misologists - Haters Of Reason. Their Armed Doctrine Is Little More Than A Chaotic Penal Code Underscored By Impotent Dreams Of Genocide. And, Like All Religions, It Is A Massive Agglutination Of Stock Response, Of Cliches, Of Inherited And Unexamined Formulations.
Dream
Champion
Islam
One Of The Unseen Benefits Of Having Children Is That They Deliver You From Your Own Selfishness. There's No Going Back.
Children
Father
Selfishness
Dickens Is A Much Misunderstood And Mis-approached Writer, In That He Tends To Be Read, Particularly In The Twentieth Century, As A Social Commentator - Like The Great Victorians, A Realist In His Way. But He Isn't At All Like That. His Genre Is Actually More Like A Fairy Tale - Weird Transformations, Long Voyages From Which People Come Back Altered, Parental Mysteries, Semi-magical Twists.
Genre Is
Long
People
Present-day Spain Translates As Many Books Into Spanish, Annually, As The Arab World Has Translated Into Arabic In The Past 1,100 Years.
Book
Past
Years
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