Top 80 Quotes & Sayings by Kingsley Amis
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English novelist Kingsley Amis.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.
There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.
Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.
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.
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.
He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.
I sometimes feel that more lousy dishes are presented under the banner of pate than any other.
If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.
Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.
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.
It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.
Death has this much to be said for it: You don't have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free.
When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is.
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.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' "Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
[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.
Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.
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.
A blonde girl wearing a man's shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy.
I'll pour you the first one and after that, if you don't have one, it's your own f****** fault. You know where it is.
Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
Cats are only human, they have their faults.
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.
More always means worse.
Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch.
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.
The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what's funny is one of them.
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)."
It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.
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.
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.
Outside every fat man there is an even fatter man trying to close in.
Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.
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.
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.
A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for.
The Scandinavians are dear people but they've never been what you might call bywords for wit and sparkle, have they?
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.
It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
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.
Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
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.
Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European.
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.
Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.
Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.
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