Kingsley Amis Quotes
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Be glad you're fifty - andThat you got there while things were nice,In a world worth looking at twice.So here's wishing you many more years,But not all that many. Cheers!
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'You're still the same girl. What people do doesn't change their nature.'She shook her head.… 'What they do is their nature,' she said.
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He was short on the one attribute certain to meet the immediate respect of the rich - i.e. being rich - and must therefore obtrude deterrents against being buggered about.
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When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a s**t you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is and there is no use crying over spilt milk.
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If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
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Nothing divided people more deeply than how they felt about cats.
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We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it.
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Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.
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If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is. (pg. 140)
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'Shitty things are always simple. Same as great things. Patrick Standish, in conversation.'
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I was never an Angry Young Man. I am angry only when I hit my thumb with a hammer.
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A blonde girl wearing a man's shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy.
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Any man in the company of two women is outnumbered four to one however amiable they may be.
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I want a dish to taste good, rather than to have been seethed in pig's milk and served wrapped in a rhubarb leaf with grated thistle root.
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A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch.
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The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.
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The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that it should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree.
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The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what's funny is one of them.
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Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.
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I don't say that the drunk man is the real man, and the sober man merely a shell. But you find out something different about people when they're drunk. Of course, you sometimes find that they're not different at all--that you merely get more of the same, perhaps said rather more loudly and incoherently, but basically the same.
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Never despise a drink because it is easy to make and/or uses commercial mixes. Unquestioning devotion to authenticity is, in any department of life, a mark of the naive - or worse.
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Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
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Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
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You'll find that marriage is a good short cut to the truth. No, not quite that. A way of doubling back to the truth. Another thing you'll find is that the years of illusion aren't those of adolescense, as the grown-ups try to tell us; they're the ones immediately after it, say the middle twenties, the false maturity if you like, when you first get thoroughly embroiled in things and lose your head. Your age, by the way, Jim. That's when you first realize that sex is important to other people besides yourself. A discovery like that can't help knocking you off balance for a time.