Kingsley Amis Quotes

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.

Kingsley Amis

• Writing
• Annoy

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Quotes to Explore

• 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.

  

  Gabrielle Zevin
  • Writing
  • School
  • Present

• 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.

  

  Ian Doescher
  • Writing
  • Fun
  • Star

• 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.

  

  Rachel Johnson
  • Writing
  • Done
  • Thing

• Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

  

  Oscar Wilde
  • Enemies
  • Forgive
  • Annoy

• 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.

  

  Randy Newman
  • Writing
  • Truth
  • Yourself

• 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.

  

  Sam Shepard
  • Writing
  • Way
  • Acting

• 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.

  

  Jackie DeShannon
  • Work
  • Writing
  • Singing

• I was going to try to get into the creative writing program at Berkeley; it's just that the acting thing worked out.

  

  Mahershala Ali
  • Writing
  • Acting
  • Creative

• 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.

  

  Garth Risk Hallberg
  • Writing
  • Dying
  • Ego

• There are no rules to writing a song.

  

  Randy Castillo Mötley Crüe
  • Writing
  • Song
  • Rules

• 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.

  

  Fede Alvarez
  • People
  • Writing
  • Movie

• 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.

  

  Irwin Shaw
  • People
  • Work
  • Writing

• 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.

  

  Gayle Forman
  • Life
  • Kind
  • Mom

• 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.

  

  M. J. Rose
  • Up
  • Writing
  • Dream

• 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.

  

  Gabrielle Zevin
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Business

• 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.

  

  Edgar Allan Poe
  • Writing
  • Think
  • Song

• 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.

  

  Camila Cabello Fifth Harmony
  • People
  • Good
  • Writing

• When we saw our plane on TV as breaking news, it was the most surreal experience. A lot of the women were crying. There was a gentleman who was writing in his journal and crying. Seeing that isn't easy.

  

  Taryn Manning Boomkat
  • Writing
  • Women
  • Experience

• From my most unnoticed actions,

  

  C.P. Cavafy
  • Writing
  • Action
  • Unnoticed

• I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.

  

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Food
  • Water
  • Moving

• I'm a bit of a Luddite, really: I don't use email much, as I started drowning in it. So I said 'screw this' and dumped my laptop, though I've begun to re-engage with it.

  

  Charles Hazlewood

• Whereas painting is a more rarefied art form, with a limited audience, I recognized film as this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people.

  

  Kathryn Bigelow
  • People
  • Art
  • Painting

• One thing that's true of gritty people is they love what they do, and they keep loving what they do. So they're not just in love for a day or a week. People who are really gritty - they're still interested.

  

  Angela Duckworth
  • People
  • True

• If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.

  

  Kingsley Amis
  • Writing
  • Annoy