Kingsley Amis Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

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

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

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

Kingsley Amis
We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
Can get by without it.
Women don't seem to think that's good enough;
They write about it.

Kingsley Amis
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.

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

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

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
No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare.

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 can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think there's little point in writing.

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

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

Kingsley Amis
It's quite a problem for retired people, I do see. All of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast. All those hours with nothing to stay sober for. Or nothing to naturally stay sober during, if you see what I…We used to laugh at Malcolm's dad, the way he used to mark up the wireless programs in Radio Times in different-coloured pencils. Never caught him listening to any of them but it was an hour taken care of.

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

Kingsley Amis
Death has got something to be said for it:
There's no need to get out of bed for it;
Wherever you may be,
They bring it to you, free.

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
Should you revisit us
Stay a little longer
And get to know the place...
On local life we trust
The resident witness
Not the royal tourist.

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
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.

Kingsley Amis