Kingsley Amis Quotes & Sayings

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. — Kingsley Amis

Beware of curiously shaped or oddly-got-up bottles: you are likely to be paying for the parcel rather than what is wrapped up in it. — Kingsley Amis

If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is. — Kingsley Amis

Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work. — Kingsley Amis

He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover. — Kingsley Amis

Everybody had been in their twenties then; well, round about thirty. Now, from round about seventy, all those years of maturity or the prime of life or whatever you called it looked like an interval between two bouts of vomiting. — Kingsley Amis

Bowen looked nervously about for peasants. It would be unendurable if they all turned out to be full of instinctive wisdom and natural good manners and unself-conscious grace and a deep, articulate understanding of death. — Kingsley Amis

Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence. — Kingsley Amis

{Rogers} sexual aim is "to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature who is the opposite of these: to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal. — Kingsley Amis

Cited by the author of 'Lucky Jim' as one of the most dismal depressing questions in the English language: Shall we go straight in? — Kingsley Amis

Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go. — Kingsley Amis

Nothing short of physical handicap has ever made anybody turn over a new leaf. — Kingsley Amis

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn. - SAMUEL JOHNSON — Kingsley Amis

I sometimes feel that more lousy dishes are presented under the banner of pate than any other. — Kingsley Amis

He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. — Kingsley Amis

It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you. — Kingsley Amis

All his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face. — Kingsley Amis

For a man as keen as he on getting into bed with women, keeping hidden the full enormity of his fatness was a chronic problem. Its most acute form naturally came up when someone new had to be hustled or cajoled past the point of no return. That point tended to get later and later as his belly waxed. — Kingsley Amis

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 — Kingsley Amis

There was no excuse which didn't consist of inexcusable. — Kingsley Amis

Cats are only human, they have their faults. — Kingsley Amis

Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do. — Kingsley Amis

Lyall felt he could not say which of two things was harder to put up with, the Abbot's conversational style, with its bland coherence and assumption of severely limited cogitative powers in the hearer, or his recurrent look of pleased surprise as each fresh piece of evidence of his wisdom or moral worth turned up, but between them they were likely to implant in certain minds a hardy seed of revolt. — Kingsley Amis

America takes her writers too seriously. — Kingsley Amis

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. — Kingsley Amis

John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels? — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

I am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen. — Kingsley Amis

The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what's funny is one of them. — Kingsley Amis

He thought how much he liked her and had in common with her, and how much she'd like and have in common with him if she only knew him. — Kingsley Amis

Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another. — Kingsley Amis

If you want to behave better and feel better, the only absolutely certain method is drinking less. But to find out how to do that, you will have to find a more expert expert than I shall ever be. — Kingsley Amis

With all respect to James Bond, a martini should be stirred, not shaken. — Kingsley Amis

Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music. — Kingsley Amis

When the bishop farted we were amused to hear about it. Should the ploughboy find treasure we must be told. But when the ploughboy farts ... er ... keep it to yourself. — Kingsley Amis

We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it — Kingsley Amis

When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time. — Kingsley Amis

It is a poor mind that is never in conflict. — Kingsley Amis

A blonde girl wearing a man's shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy. — Kingsley Amis

If you want to finish the evening with your usual number of fingers, do any cutting-up, peel-slicing and the like before you have had more than a couple of drinks, preferably before your first. — Kingsley Amis

In it {a film Peter saw} a sadistic sergeant broke the spirit of soldier in a military prison by beating him up at systematically random intervals, from more than a day down to a quarter of an hour, so that the victim never knew when the next attack was coming, never felt safe. Life with Muriel, it seemed to Peter, had over the last seven or eight years turned into a decreasingly bearable version of that. — Kingsley Amis

The trouble with the hypochondriac is that he will be wrong about his condition nine hundred and ninety-nine times. — Kingsley Amis

To write things down as luck wasn't the same as writing them off as non-existent or in some way beneath consideration. — Kingsley Amis

I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to. — Kingsley Amis

SF's NO GOOD!
They bellow 'til we're deaf
But =this= is good
Well, then, it's not SF! — Kingsley Amis

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'
Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him. — Kingsley Amis

Let complication thrive. — Kingsley Amis

... the gaps
in sensitivity displayed are vast.
Concepts that have not often been surpassed
For ignorance or downright nastiness -
That the habit of indifference is less
Destructive than the embrace of love, that crimes
Are paid for never or a thousand times,
That the gentle come to grief - all these are forced
Into scenes, dialogue, comments, and endorsed
By the main action, manifesting there
An inhumanity beyond despair. — Kingsley Amis

When I find someone I respect writing about an edgy, nervous wine that dithered in the glass, I cringe. When I hear someone I don't respect talking about an austere, unforgiving wine, I turn a bit austere and unforgiving myself. When I come across stuff like that and remember about the figs and bananas, I want to snigger uneasily. You can call a wine red, and dry, and strong, and pleasant. After that, watch out ... — Kingsley Amis

Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them. — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not. — Kingsley Amis

One of the great benefits of organised religion is that you can be forgiven your sins, which must be a wonderful thing ... I mean, I carry my sins around with me, there's nobody there to forgive them. — Kingsley Amis

Yes. 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. The old hopeless passion, isn't it? — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch. — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

For the first time he really felt that it was no use trying to save those who fundamentally would rather not be saved. — Kingsley Amis

More always means worse. — Kingsley Amis

I don't allow people of your sort to stand in my way. That's what you're leaving out of account. I'm having Christine because it's my right. Do you understand that? If I'm after something, I don't care what I do to make sure that I get it. That's the only law I abide by; it's the only was to get things in this world ... With me you just haven't a hope in hell. — Kingsley Amis

You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation. — Kingsley Amis

The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that is should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree. — Kingsley Amis

He could sense her breathing, her temple against his jaw and her shoulder under his hand were warm, her hair smelt of well-brushed hair, he could feel the presence of her body ... — Kingsley Amis

It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children. — Kingsley Amis

They went outside and stood where a sign used to say Taxi and now said Taxi/Tacsi for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X before. — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

You'll find that marriage is a good short cut to the truth. No, not quite that. A way of doubling back to the truth. Another thing you'll find is that the years of illusion aren't those of adolescence, as the grown-ups try to tell us; they're the ones immediately after it, say the middle twenties, the false maturity if you like, when you first get thoroughly embroiled in things and lose your head. Your age, by the way, Jim. That's when you first realize that sex is important to other people besides yourself. A discovery like that can't help knocking you off balance for a time. — Kingsley Amis

Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners. — Kingsley Amis

People get themselves all steamed up about weather they're in love or not. They ought to realize that the love part is perfectly easy; the hard part is working out, not about love, but about what they're going to do. The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word "love" as a signal a signal for switching them off. They can get somewhere instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of emotional self-catechising about how you know you're in love, and what love is anyway, and all the rest of it. — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

I was never an Angry Young Man. I am angry only when I hit my thumb with a hammer. — Kingsley Amis

I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative party because it is the party of nonpolitics, of resistance to politics. I have seen how many of the evils of life - failure, loneliness, fear, boredom, inability to communicate - are ineradicable by political means, and that attempts so to eradicate them are disastrous. — Kingsley Amis

Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food. — Kingsley Amis

It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with. — Kingsley Amis

If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong. — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European ... — Kingsley Amis

I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it. — Kingsley Amis

For a moment he felt like devoting the next ten years to working his way to a position as art critic on purpose to review Bertrand's work unfavorably. — Kingsley Amis

Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for. — Kingsley Amis

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad. — Kingsley Amis

I want a dish to taste good, rather than to have been seethed in pig's milk and served wrapped in a rhubarb leaf with grated thistle root. — Kingsley Amis

Some mysterious revenge of nature has seen to it that no poem in praise of drink or tobacco (or snuff, if any) can succeed. — Kingsley Amis

When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a s**t you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is and there is no use crying over spilt milk. — Kingsley Amis

It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction. — Kingsley Amis

It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children. — Kingsley Amis

Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way. — Kingsley Amis

I don't say that the drunk man is the real man, and the sober man merely a shell. But you find out something different about people when they're drunk. Of course, you sometimes find that they're not different at all
that you merely get more of the same, perhaps said rather more loudly and incoherently, but basically the same. — Kingsley Amis

Self criticism must be my guide to action, and the first rule for its employment is that in itself it is not a virtue, only a procedure. — Kingsley Amis

Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto. — Kingsley Amis

There are other things to a woman than taking her to bed. — Kingsley Amis

The Scandinavians are dear people but they've never been what you might call bywords for wit and sparkle, have they? — Kingsley Amis

[Science fiction's] most important use, I submit, is a means of dramatizing social inquiry, as providing a fictional mode in which cultural tendencies can be isolated and judged. — Kingsley Amis

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

He thought to himself now that if ever he went into the brewing business his posters would have written across the top "Bowen's Beer", and then underneath that in the middle a picture of Mrs. Knowles driniking a lot of it and falling about, and then across the bottom in bold or salient lettering the words "Makes You Drunk". — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

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)." — Kingsley Amis