Kingsley Amis Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Degrees, Weight, Requirements

  Kingsley Amis (2010). “Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis”, p.90, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  53 Copy quote

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

  Kingsley Amis

  Writing, Editing, Littles

  34 Copy quote

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

  Kingsley Amis

  Knowing, May, Rewards

  1984 Stanley and the Women, ch.2.

  34 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kingsley Amis

  Jobs, Hangover, Sadness

  "Distilled Kingsley: The late, great author - and prodigious drinker - gives his advice on beating a hangover" by Kingsley Amis, www.dailymail.co.uk. December 26, 2008.

  39 Copy quote

• If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.

  Kingsley Amis

  Verbs, Adverbs, Ifs

  29 Copy quote

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

  Kingsley Amis

  World, Strikes, Terrible

  Kingsley Amis (1990). “The Amis collection: selected non-fiction, 1954-1990”, Arrow

  31 Copy quote

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

  Kingsley Amis

  Love, Sex, Letting You Go

  Kingsley Amis (2016). “Collected Poems: 1944-1979”, p.68, New York Review of Books

  24 Copy quote

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

  Kingsley Amis

  Lunch, Breakfast, May

  "Aren't We Due a Royalty Statement?". Book by Giles Gordon, 1993.

  26 Copy quote

• 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

  Party, Mean, Political

  Kingsley Amis (1968). “Lucky Jim's politics”

  31 Copy quote

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

  Kingsley Amis

  Women, Men, Wonder

  'Something Nasty in the Bookshop'

  16 Copy quote

• Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.

  Kingsley Amis

  1957 'Socialism and the Intellectuals'.

  8 Copy quote

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

  Kingsley Amis

  Laziness, Journalism, Incompetence

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  13 Copy quote

• A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for.

  Kingsley Amis

  Wine, Labels, Too Short

  10 Copy quote

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

  Kingsley Amis

  Use, Natural, Ends

  Kingsley Amis (2011). “The King's English”, p.209, Penguin UK

  16 Copy quote

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

  Kingsley Amis

  Way, Consciousness

  Kingsley Amis (1992). “Lucky Jim”, Penguin Classics

  15 Copy quote

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

  Kingsley Amis

  Love, Sex, Pull Ups

  5 Copy quote

• When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.

  Kingsley Amis

  Thinking, Starting, Motive

  5 Copy quote

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

  Kingsley Amis

  People, Might, Sparkle

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Kingsley Amis

  Real, Men, Drunk

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  War, Gone, Youth

  Kingsley Amis (1978). “Jake's Thing”, Hutchinson Radius

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Cat, Over You, Way

  1960 Take A Girl Like You, ch.5.

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Cheer, Believe, Reality

  Kingsley Amis (1992). “Lucky Jim”, Penguin Classics

  8 Copy quote

• [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

  Technology, Winning, Class

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Disappointment, Real, Loss

  11 Copy quote

• More always means worse.

  Kingsley Amis

  Mean

  6 Copy quote

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