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Amis Kingsley Quotes & Sayings

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Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

Time, plenty of it came to the rescue here: Kelly was to engage in self-expression. In Jake's vocabulary this was a vague term applied to activities like swearing and children's art but in the present context it evidently meant something more specific. The girl at once left her chair, sat down on one of the more affluent patches of carpet and clasped her knees. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

Never despise a drink because it is easy to make and/or uses commercial mixes. Unquestioning devotion to authenticity is, in any department of life, a mark of the naive - or worse. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Martin Amis

Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all. — Martin Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

To be sure about nonsense he had to be able to classify it, assign it to a family tree of liberal nonsense, humanist-humanitarian nonsense, academic nonsense, Protestant nonsense, Freudian nonsense and so on. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Russell Baker

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century. — Russell Baker

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

I've been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But those first fifteen years didn't produce much of great interest. I mean, it embarrasses me very much to look back on my early poems
very few lines of any merit at all and lots of affectation. But there were quite a lot of them. That's a point in one's favor. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

Let complication thrive. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Martin Amis

Well, my father [Kingsley Amis] was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it was good that I began when I was young and bold and foolish, otherwise I'd have become too self-conscious and aware of the weight of not having written anything yet. — Martin Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

The real trouble with liars ... was that there could never be any guarantee against their occasionally telling the truth. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

{Victor} was no exception to a rule of Alun's that men over fifty who took care of themselves were not to be trusted. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

Be glad you're fifty - andThat you got there while things were nice,In a world worth looking at twice.So here's wishing you many more years,But not all that many. Cheers! — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

Then, Patrick, you do feel it too? You do feel ... something? It would be so bleak if you felt nothing. That's what scares women, you know.'
'I do know, and you needn't be scared. I feel something all right.'
'Promise me you'll always treat me as a person.'
'I promise.'
'Promises are so easily given.'
'I'll fulfill this one. Let me show you.'
After a shaky start he was comfortably in the swing of it, having recognised he was on familiar ground after all. Experience had brought him to see that this kind of thing was nothing more than the levying of cock-tax, was reasonable and normal, in fact, even though some other parts of experience strongly suggested that what he had shelled out so far was only a down payment. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Wendy Cope

Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis
It was a dream I had last week
And some kind of record seemed vital.
I knew it wouldn't be much of a poem
But I love the title. — Wendy Cope

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

Up to a point go for quantity rather than quality. Most people would rather have two glasses of ordinary decent port than one of a rare vintage. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

More always means worse. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

[Science fiction is] that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesised on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin. It is distinguished from pure fantasy by its need to achieve verisimilitude and win the 'willing suspension of disbelief' through scientific plausibility. — Kingsley Amis

Amis Kingsley Quotes By Kingsley Amis

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

Amis Kingsley Quotes By 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