Kingsley Amis Quotes
-
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.
→ -
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' "Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
→ -
Sex stops when you pull up your pants, Love never lets you go.
→ -
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 adolescense, 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.
→ -
A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch.
→ -
Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.
→ -
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.
→ -
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
→ -
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.
→ -
It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
→ -
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.
→ -
I am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen.
→ -
Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.
→ -
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
→ -
Work was like cats were supposed to be: if you disliked and feared it and tried to keep out if its way, it knew at once and sought you out and jumped on your lap and climbed all over you to show how much it loved you. Please God, he thought, don't let me die in harness.
→ -
Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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!
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
I sometimes feel that more lousy dishes are presented under the banner of pate than any other.
→ -
I was never an Angry Young Man. I am angry only when I hit my thumb with a hammer.
→ -
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.
→ -
Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.
→ -
The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that it should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree.
→ -
Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
→ -
[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.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Saul Bellow Writer -
Bruce Chatwin Novelist -
David Lodge Author -
Elizabeth Jane Howard Novelist -
Angela Carter Novelist -
Evelyn Waugh Writer -
Erich Kastner Author -
Philip Larkin Poet -
Charlie Higson Actor -
Malcolm Bradbury Author -
Ian Fleming Author -
Robert Conquest Historian -
Vladimir Nabokov Novelist -
Christopher Hitchens Author -
Martin Amis Novelist -
Anthony Burgess Writer -
John Braine Novelist -
Sebastian Faulks Novelist -
George Eliot Novelist -
J. G. Ballard Novelist