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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.
Kingsley Amis -
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.
Kingsley Amis
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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!
Kingsley Amis -
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.
Kingsley Amis -
If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis -
Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.
Kingsley Amis -
Nothing divided people more deeply than how they felt about cats.
Kingsley Amis -
A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch.
Kingsley Amis
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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.
Kingsley Amis -
I was never an Angry Young Man. I am angry only when I hit my thumb with a hammer.
Kingsley Amis -
A blonde girl wearing a man's shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy.
Kingsley Amis -
Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.
Kingsley Amis -
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.
Kingsley Amis -
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.
Kingsley Amis
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The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what's funny is one of them.
Kingsley Amis -
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.
Kingsley Amis -
'Shitty things are always simple. Same as great things. Patrick Standish, in conversation.'
Kingsley Amis -
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.
Kingsley Amis -
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.
Kingsley Amis -
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)
Kingsley Amis
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Any man in the company of two women is outnumbered four to one however amiable they may be.
Kingsley Amis -
Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
Kingsley Amis -
Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.
Kingsley Amis -
I've been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But those first fifteen years didn't produce much of great interest. I mean, it embarrasses me very much to look back on my early poems--very few lines of any merit at all and lots of affectation. But there were quite a lot of them. That's a point in one's favor.
Kingsley Amis