Kingsley Amis Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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.

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
The delusion that there are thousands of young people about who are capable of benefiting from university training, but have somehow failed to find their way there, is…a necessary component of the expansionist case…More will mean worse.

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
His writing is sharp, lucid and logical, embodying imagination in the true sense of the word: common sense with wings.

Kingsley Amis
Alun's life was coming to consist more and more exclusively of being told at dictation speed what he knew.

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
I'll pour you the first one and after that, if you don't have one, it's your own... fault. You know where it is.

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
Any man in the company of two woman is outnumbered four to one however amiable they may be.

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
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
Be glad you're fifty — and
That 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
A blonde girl wearing a man's shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy.

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

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

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