“The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.”
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Martin Amis 136
Welsh novelist 1949Related quotes
"Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" in Profiles of the Future (1962)
Perhaps the adjective "elderly" requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!
"Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" in Profiles of the Future (1962; as revised in 1973)
On Clarke's Laws
“That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.”
Source: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World
“To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough.”
Source: Journal of Katherine Mansfield
“The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass.”
Vintage, p. 9
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965)
Context: The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass. It is at this point that propaganda can be most effective.
Banville on Saturday http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/05/banville_on_sat.html, from The New York Review of Books (source dated 10 May 2005).
The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)
Context: The selective instinct of the artist tells him when his language should be homely, and when it should be more elevated; and it is precisely in the imperceptible blending of the plain with the ornate that a great writer is distinguished. He uses the simplest phrases without triviality, and the grandest without a suggestion of grandiloquence.
“He who has thought most deeply loves what is most alive.”
Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste.
“Sokrates und Alcibiades”