Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.

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

Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.

A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.

The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.