Kingsley Amis Quotes
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Hangover cure: Rigorous sex, hydration, hot bath, then "go up for half an hour in an open aeroplane. (needless to say, with a non-hungover person at the controls)."
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Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
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Twentieth century music is like paedophilia. No matter how persuasively and persistently its champions urge their cause, it will never be accepted by the public at large, who will continue to regard it with incomprehension, outrage and repugnance.
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He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.
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I'll pour you the first one and after that, if you don't have one, it's your own f****** fault. You know where it is.
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Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
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The Scandinavians are dear people but they've never been what you might call bywords for wit and sparkle, have they?
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When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
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Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.
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Death has this much to be said for it: You don't have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free.
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More will mean worse.
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I sometimes feel that more lousy dishes are presented under the banner of pate than any other.
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I wish I could have a little tape-and-loudspeaker arrangement sewn into the binding of this magazine, to be triggered off by the light reflected from the reader's eyes on to this part of the page, and set to bawl out at several bels: MORE WILL MEAN WORSE.
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How wrong people always were when they said: 'It's better to know the worst than go on not knowing either way.' No; they had it exactly the wrong way round. Tell me the truth, doctor, I'd sooner know. But only if the truth is what I want to hear.
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To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.
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It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
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Cats are only human, they have their faults.
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Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what's more you want to go on fitting it.
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He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
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The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disappointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must.
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He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.
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Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.
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Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages.
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His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.