Best 85 quotes of Kingsley Amis on MyQuotes

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

A blonde girl wearing a man's shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy.

A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for, a daunting testimony to that peculiar nation's love of detail and organization.

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!

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

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

Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.

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

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.

He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.

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.

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).

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

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 am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen.

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.

If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.

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.

It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;Girls aren't like that.

Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.

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.

Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

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.

One of the great benefits of organised religion is that you can be forgiven your sins, which must be a wonderful thing. I mean, I carry my sins around with me, there's nobody there to forgive them.

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

Outside every fat man there is an even fatter man trying to close in.

[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.

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.

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

Sex stops when you pull up your pants, Love never lets you go.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.