Ed Martin Quotes

I sometimes feel I'm a sort of cult writer, rather than a mainstream writer, in that those who like my stuff like it a lot, but the appeal is not that broad.

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.

They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.

The Uruguayans have a sort of purity. I don't know where they got it, and I doubt even if they know from where they got it. Perhaps they didn't kill off their major population.

But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.

It is straightforward — and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.

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.

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.

On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational -- to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.

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.

If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.

Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.

It is not the nature of the task, but its consecration, that is the vital thing.

Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return.

You can say that this is just what aerospace medicine is all about - to save the lives of the men who climb to the high reaches above the Earth and beyond this planet.

I'm a lucky boy. Never wanted for anything; new tracksuit, new pair of football boots. I had a happy childhood.

You know what intimacy is? It's into-me-you-see...

Power is seldom innocent, and envy is the yokefellow of eminence.

Yet is beauty the pleasing trickery that cheateth half the world.

Many a beggar at the crossway, or gray-haired shepherd on the plain, hath more of the end of all wealth than hundreds who multiply the means.

Acting is the only thing I'm even vaguely good at and acting is something that I think I do know about.

I look like the man in the moon.

What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff about us as human beings.

I have a very extreme state of mind. Things are very black or very white.

If you are a plumber, you can work on a shed, or you can work on a mansion. It's just scale.

It's a bit like a fledgeling duck, finding your flippers.

Like with anything, good writing suggest itself pretty strongly.

I've been doing interviews for years, and in all that time, I've virtually never read one and gone, 'Yep, factually and tonally that's exactly what happened.' Pretty much never.

When I wear jeans I want to look like a man, not a child.

I hope I inspire children to make films.

Every actor is riddled with insecurity, of course. But weirdly, I don't really find that I'd be daunted with taking on roles or anything.

I like the idea of not everything happening between two human beings to be everyone's property.

There is nothing far-fetched about disappointment as a subject for comedy. It's something we are all too familiar with.

I value being able to go into a record shop and people leaving me alone.

I can spot someone with similar fashion sense to me a mile off.

I buy DVDs. I don't really buy CDs unless they're for other people.

However happy the director is, I have to be okay with it. I'm pretty strict with myself, about throwing things out or trying to be true to whatever the situation dictates.

Every day I turn on my television set and I see Newt Gingrich on television, I rejoice.

The only things we have to worry about are really stupid things.

Songwriting is a mysterious art. When I sit down to write a song, the end result should be mysterious and have this dark quality.

If you believe it's life or death for the kids, it changes everything you do.

We still by no means think decisively enough about the essence of action.

A giving which gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and withdraws, such a giving we call sending.

It is the crucifixion that distinguishes the new message from the mythologies of all other peoples.

Lots of old slaves closes the door before they tell the truth about their days of slavery.

If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.

We grew to know the meaning of love. That is what allowed me and my family to stay close together.

I try to always step up to the plate, be professional, be good at what I'm doing and deliver on the character. In Hollywood, what more can you ask for. You want a consummate professional.