Kingsley Amis Quotes
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It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
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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.
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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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Friendship includes charity. But there's no charity in sex.
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No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.
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His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.
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More always means worse.
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No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare.
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If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
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If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.
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While he was climbing the litter-strewn steps his left ball gave a sharp twinge, on and off like a light-switch, then again after he had sat down. Nothing. Just one of the aches and pains that come and go. No significance.
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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.
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Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.
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Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;Girls aren't like that.
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It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
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A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for.
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' "Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
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You can't screw the rich, something in Ronnie muttered as Miss Quick got off him with quite as much alacrity as she had got on him. You have to let them screw you. Or else you leave out screwing altogether.
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The world that seemed so various and new, well, it does contract. One's burning desire to investigate human behavior, and to make, or imply, statements about it, does fall off. And so one does find that early works are full of energy and also full of vulgarity, crudity, and incompetence, and later works are more carefully finished, and in that sense better literary products. But . . . there's often a freshness that is missing in later works--for every gain there's a loss. I think it evens out in that way.