Kingsley Amis Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Cats are only human, they have their faults.

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

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

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.

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.

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)."

Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.

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

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' "Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.