Kingsley Amis Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
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Writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was a fun exercise in mixing just the right amount of the Bard with just the right amount of everyone's favorite galaxy far, far away.
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I love writing journalism because it's all over in two hours and comes straight off the top of the head. Writing novels is soooooo much harder. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.
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Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
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I like the performing. And interviews, even. And the stuff that's not sitting in a room by yourself with empty paper. But I never loved writing, to tell you the truth.
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There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.
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There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I'm not so interested in the divisions. I'm interested in the way things cross over.
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Well, as an artist, I think that Elvis's generosity to me he always talked very highly about me, he always spoke very highly about my work and singing and my writing.
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I was going to try to get into the creative writing program at Berkeley; it's just that the acting thing worked out.
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The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.
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There are no rules to writing a song.
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As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.
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Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own.
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I love being a mom. But there's a certain kind of tedium to your life when your kid is young. Writing allows you to wander when your kid is napping in a crib ten feet away. So that's the great joy of writing fiction for me.
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When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It's brutal on my writing.
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Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.
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There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.
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I've had writing sessions with people, but I've never had one where you're just there, and you start making a song, and then it's too good to be true that something really cool will come out of this.
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I used to be something of an obsessive when it came to research. When I first began writing the Thorne novels, I would drive to a set of traffic lights in the early hours of the morning to make sure you could turn left. I thought it was important to get even the most trivial details right.
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I really enjoyed staying at an encampment at the top of a hill in the Samburu Reserve in Kenya. You reach it on a small plane; there is no electricity, no city noises and you sleep and shower under the Milky Way, with moths fluttering around a kerosene lamp, knowing that there are elephants and lions roaming free in the valley.
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That's what life is - you follow where your heart leads you - at least I do.
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It takes guts to get out of the ruts.
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If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
