Top 100 Kingsley Amis Quotes
#1. 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
#2. There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn. - SAMUEL JOHNSON
Kingsley Amis
#3. 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
#5. The trouble with the hypochondriac is that he will be wrong about his condition nine hundred and ninety-nine times.
Kingsley Amis
#6. Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.
Kingsley Amis
#7. When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
Kingsley Amis
#8. No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.
Kingsley Amis
#9. 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
#10. It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.
Kingsley Amis
#11. Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European ...
Kingsley Amis
#12. Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
Kingsley Amis
#13. The Scandinavians are dear people but they've never been what you might call bywords for wit and sparkle, have they?
Kingsley Amis
#14. A blonde girl wearing a man's shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy.
Kingsley Amis
#15. Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.
Kingsley Amis
#16. 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.
Kingsley Amis
#17. For a man as keen as he on getting into bed with women, keeping hidden the full enormity of his fatness was a chronic problem. Its most acute form naturally came up when someone new had to be hustled or cajoled past the point of no return. That point tended to get later and later as his belly waxed.
Kingsley Amis
#18. 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
#19. 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.
Kingsley Amis
#20. You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation.
Kingsley Amis
#21. If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis
#22. The real trouble with liars ... was that there could never be any guarantee against their occasionally telling the truth.
Kingsley Amis
#23. Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.
Kingsley Amis
#24. Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'
Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
Kingsley Amis
#25. He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.
Kingsley Amis
#26. Everybody had been in their twenties then; well, round about thirty. Now, from round about seventy, all those years of maturity or the prime of life or whatever you called it looked like an interval between two bouts of vomiting.
Kingsley Amis
#27. A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for.
Kingsley Amis
#28. 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
#29. It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction.
Kingsley Amis
#30. When the bishop farted we were amused to hear about it. Should the ploughboy find treasure we must be told. But when the ploughboy farts ... er ... keep it to yourself.
Kingsley Amis
#31. A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch.
Kingsley Amis
#32. There was no excuse which didn't consist of inexcusable.
Kingsley Amis
#33. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.
Kingsley Amis
#34. If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.
Kingsley Amis
#35. 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.
Kingsley Amis
#36. 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
#37. The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what's funny is one of them.
Kingsley Amis
#38. [Science fiction's] most important use, I submit, is a means of dramatizing social inquiry, as providing a fictional mode in which cultural tendencies can be isolated and judged.
Kingsley Amis
#39. 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.
Kingsley Amis
#40. {Rogers} sexual aim is "to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature who is the opposite of these: to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.
Kingsley Amis
#41. He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
Kingsley Amis
#42. He thought how much he liked her and had in common with her, and how much she'd like and have in common with him if she only knew him.
Kingsley Amis
#43. I was never an Angry Young Man. I am angry only when I hit my thumb with a hammer.
Kingsley Amis
#44. 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
#45. Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
Kingsley Amis
#46. I sometimes feel that more lousy dishes are presented under the banner of pate than any other.
Kingsley Amis
#47. If you want to finish the evening with your usual number of fingers, do any cutting-up, peel-slicing and the like before you have had more than a couple of drinks, preferably before your first.
Kingsley Amis
#48. The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that is should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree.
Kingsley Amis
#49. He could sense her breathing, her temple against his jaw and her shoulder under his hand were warm, her hair smelt of well-brushed hair, he could feel the presence of her body ...
Kingsley Amis
#50. Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.
Kingsley Amis
#51. Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.
Kingsley Amis
#52. 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
#53. Sex stops when you pull up your pants,
Love never lets you go.
Kingsley Amis
#56. 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
#57. John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?
Kingsley Amis
#58. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
Kingsley Amis
#60. Nothing short of physical handicap has ever made anybody turn over a new leaf.
Kingsley Amis
#61. 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
#62. If you want to behave better and feel better, the only absolutely certain method is drinking less. But to find out how to do that, you will have to find a more expert expert than I shall ever be.
Kingsley Amis
#63. 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
#64. I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it.
Kingsley Amis
#65. Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.
Kingsley Amis
#67. 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
#68. If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis
#69. For the first time he really felt that it was no use trying to save those who fundamentally would rather not be saved.
Kingsley Amis
#70. 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
#71. They went outside and stood where a sign used to say Taxi and now said Taxi/Tacsi for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X before.
Kingsley Amis
#72. It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.
Kingsley Amis
#73. For a moment he felt like devoting the next ten years to working his way to a position as art critic on purpose to review Bertrand's work unfavorably.
Kingsley Amis
#74. 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
#75. Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.
Kingsley Amis
#76. It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.
Kingsley Amis
#77. To write things down as luck wasn't the same as writing them off as non-existent or in some way beneath consideration.
Kingsley Amis
#78. 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.
Kingsley Amis
#79. With all respect to James Bond, a martini should be stirred, not shaken.
Kingsley Amis
#80. Up to a point go for quantity rather than quality. Most people would rather have two glasses of ordinary decent port than one of a rare vintage.
Kingsley Amis
#81. 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
#82. Beware of curiously shaped or oddly-got-up bottles: you are likely to be paying for the parcel rather than what is wrapped up in it.
Kingsley Amis
#84. 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!
Kingsley Amis
#85. There are other things to a woman than taking her to bed.
Kingsley Amis
#86. 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.
Kingsley Amis
#87. Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.
Kingsley Amis
#88. Bowen looked nervously about for peasants. It would be unendurable if they all turned out to be full of instinctive wisdom and natural good manners and unself-conscious grace and a deep, articulate understanding of death.
Kingsley Amis
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Any man in the company of two woman is outnumbered four to one however amiable they may be. By definition."
'So when its just you and me I outnumber you two to one, is that right?'
"Affirmative.
Kingsley Amis
#93. Cited by the author of 'Lucky Jim' as one of the most dismal depressing questions in the English language: Shall we go straight in?
Kingsley Amis
#94. Some mysterious revenge of nature has seen to it that no poem in praise of drink or tobacco (or snuff, if any) can succeed.
Kingsley Amis
#95. 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.
Kingsley Amis
#96. SF's NO GOOD!
They bellow 'til we're deaf
But =this= is good
Well, then, it's not SF!
Kingsley Amis
#97. {Victor} was no exception to a rule of Alun's that men over fifty who took care of themselves were not to be trusted.
Kingsley Amis
#98. He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.
Kingsley Amis
#99. To be sure about nonsense he had to be able to classify it, assign it to a family tree of liberal nonsense, humanist-humanitarian nonsense, academic nonsense, Protestant nonsense, Freudian nonsense and so on.
Kingsley Amis
#100. It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.
Kingsley Amis
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