Kingsley Amis Quotes
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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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I am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen.
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There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
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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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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.
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It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.
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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.
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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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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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Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
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Cats are only human, they have their faults.
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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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Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.
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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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Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
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Women don't seem to think it's good enough; They write about it.
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It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.
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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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Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.
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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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It scored right away with me by being the smooth, fine-grained sort, not the coarse flaky, dry-on-the-outside rubbish full of chunds of gut and gristle to testify to its authenticity.
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He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.
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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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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.