Kingsley Amis Quotes

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

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

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

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

Cats are only human, they have their faults.

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

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

Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

[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.

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

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)."

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

More always means worse.

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.

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.

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.

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

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'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.

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

Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food.

I was never an Angry Young Man. I am angry only when I hit my thumb with a hammer.