After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don't do it. I have been out there. It is a mess....

The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.

Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.