Kingsley Amis Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;
Girls aren't like that.

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

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

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
Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap.

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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