Kingsley Amis Quotes
-
I am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen.
-
Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.
-
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)."
-
Cats are only human, they have their faults.
-
When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
-
Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap.
-
There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
-
It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.
-
Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
-
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.
-
Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means ... the need to be left. I am driven to grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.
-
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.
-
Women don't seem to think it's good enough; They write about it.
-
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.
-
Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.
-
Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
-
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.
-
It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.
-
I sometimes feel that more lousy dishes are presented under the banner of pate than any other.
-
It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
-
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.
-
Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time.
-
Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.
-
His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.