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What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and 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.

— Martin Amis Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin (1997)

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Funny

More quotes by Martin Amis

In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.

The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.

All publicity isn't good publicity. As a New York publicist put it: "What: the guy's an asshole so I'll go and buy his novel?"

Experience (2000)

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

The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.

Einstein's Monsters (1987)

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Wit's an unruly engine, wildly striking
Sometimes a friend, sometimes the engineer.

George Herbert The Temple (1633)

A tragedy can never suffer by delay: a comedy may, because the allusions or the manners represented in it maybe temporary.

Horace Walpole

The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel– a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.

Horace Walpole

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Karl Barth The Harper Book of Quotations (1993)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Martin Amis (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.