Kingsley Amis Quotes

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.

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)."

Up to a point go for quantity rather than quality. Most people would rather have two glasses of ordinary decent port than one of a rare vintage.

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

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

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

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

Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.

[Science fiction's] most important use, I submit, is a means of dramatizing social inquiry, as providing a fictional mode in which cultural tendencies can be isolated and judged.

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.

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

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

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

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

As far back as she could remember, she had gone in for day-dreams about what clothes, jewellery and the like she would wear if, like her admired and adored Marie Antoinette, she were somehow to find herself facing public execution. A country GP's visit was hardly on that scale, but the principle held.

He could sense her breathing, her temple against his jaw and her shoulder under his hand were warm, her hair smelt of well-brushed hair, he could feel the presence of her body ...

{Victor} was no exception to a rule of Alun's that men over fifty who took care of themselves were not to be trusted.

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

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

To be sure about nonsense he had to be able to classify it, assign it to a family tree of liberal nonsense, humanist-humanitarian nonsense, academic nonsense, Protestant nonsense, Freudian nonsense and so on.

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

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.

. . . he had forgotten, if he had ever begun to understand, how small a part people played in others' lives and how little they knew about them, even if they saw them every day.

With all respect to James Bond, a martini should be stirred, not shaken.

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

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 ...

Let complication thrive.

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

I wish I could have a little tape-and-loudspeaker arrangement sewn into the binding of this magazine, to be triggered off by the light reflected from the reader's eyes on to this part of the page, and set to bawl out at several bels: MORE WILL MEAN WORSE.

Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

SF's NO GOOD!
They bellow 'til we're deaf
But =this= is good
Well, then, it's not SF!

And why did this Probert pretend to be so Welsh? I remembered that like me he'd been awarded nought for Welsh in School Certificate. Such a result, in that language, means an almost psychotic ignorance. It's standard practice, of course, with writers of Probert's allegiance to pretend to be wild valley babblers, woaded with pit-dirt and sheep-shit, thinking in Welsh the whole time and obsessed by terrible beauty, etc., but in fact they tend to come from comfortable middle-class homes, have a good urban education, never go near a lay preacher and couldn't even order a pint in Welsh, falling back, as Probert had done earlier in the evening, on things like the Welsh for big Jesus. (And don't tell me they can think in Welsh without knowing the language. Ever tried thinking in Bantu?)

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

John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?

The real trouble with liars ... was that there could never be any guarantee against their occasionally telling the truth.

Everybody had been in their twenties then; well, round about thirty. Now, from round about seventy, all those years of maturity or the prime of life or whatever you called it looked like an interval between two bouts of vomiting.

If you want to behave better and feel better, the only absolutely certain method is drinking less. But to find out how to do that, you will have to find a more expert expert than I shall ever be.

All his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face.

For a moment he felt like devoting the next ten years to working his way to a position as art critic on purpose to review Bertrand's work unfavorably.

No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.

In it {a film Peter saw} a sadistic sergeant broke the spirit of soldier in a military prison by beating him up at systematically random intervals, from more than a day down to a quarter of an hour, so that the victim never knew when the next attack was coming, never felt safe. Life with Muriel, it seemed to Peter, had over the last seven or eight years turned into a decreasingly bearable version of that.

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

Beware of curiously shaped or oddly-got-up bottles: you are likely to be paying for the parcel rather than what is wrapped up in it.

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

Then, Patrick, you do feel it too? You do feel ... something? It would be so bleak if you felt nothing. That's what scares women, you know.'
'I do know, and you needn't be scared. I feel something all right.'
'Promise me you'll always treat me as a person.'
'I promise.'
'Promises are so easily given.'
'I'll fulfill this one. Let me show you.'
After a shaky start he was comfortably in the swing of it, having recognised he was on familiar ground after all. Experience had brought him to see that this kind of thing was nothing more than the levying of cock-tax, was reasonable and normal, in fact, even though some other parts of experience strongly suggested that what he had shelled out so far was only a down payment.

... the gaps
in sensitivity displayed are vast.
Concepts that have not often been surpassed
For ignorance or downright nastiness -
That the habit of indifference is less
Destructive than the embrace of love, that crimes
Are paid for never or a thousand times,
That the gentle come to grief - all these are forced
Into scenes, dialogue, comments, and endorsed
By the main action, manifesting there
An inhumanity beyond despair.

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 adolescence, 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.

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

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

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.

Cats are only human, they have their faults.

People get themselves all steamed up about weather they're in love or not. They ought to realize that the love part is perfectly easy; the hard part is working out, not about love, but about what they're going to do. The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word "love" as a signal a signal for switching them off. They can get somewhere instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of emotional self-catechising about how you know you're in love, and what love is anyway, and all the rest of it.

[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.

More always means worse.

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

No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare

To write things down as luck wasn't the same as writing them off as non-existent or in some way beneath consideration.

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

There are other things to a woman than taking her to bed.

Yes. 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. The old hopeless passion, isn't it?

When the bishop farted we were amused to hear about it. Should the ploughboy find treasure we must be told. But when the ploughboy farts ... er ... keep it to yourself.

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

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

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.

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

The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that is should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree.

Lyall felt he could not say which of two things was harder to put up with, the Abbot's conversational style, with its bland coherence and assumption of severely limited cogitative powers in the hearer, or his recurrent look of pleased surprise as each fresh piece of evidence of his wisdom or moral worth turned up, but between them they were likely to implant in certain minds a hardy seed of revolt.

America takes her writers too seriously.

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

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

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn. - SAMUEL JOHNSON

It is a poor mind that is never in conflict.

Standing on the pavement was a big fat man whom Dixon recognized as his barber. Dixon felt a deep respect for this man because of his impressive exterior, his rumbling bass voice, and his unsurpassable stock of information about the Royal Family. At that moment two rather pretty girls stopped at a pillar-box a few yards away. The barber, his hands clasped behind his back, turned and stared at them. An unmistakable expression of furtive lust came over his face; then, like a courtly shyopwalker, he moved slowly towards the two girls. Welch now accelerated again and Dixon, a good deal shaken hurriedly switched his attention to the other side of the road, where a cricket match was being played and the bowler was just running up to bowl. The batsman, another big fat man, swiped at the ball, missed it, and was violently hit by it in the stomach. Dixon had time to see him double up and the wicket-keeper begin to run forward before a tall hedge hid the scene.
Uncertain whether this pair of vignettes was designed to illustrate the swiftness of divine retribution or its tendency to mistake its target, Dixon was quite sure that he felt in some way overwhelmed...

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

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

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.

It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.

Any man in the company of two woman is outnumbered four to one however amiable they may be. By definition."
'So when its just you and me I outnumber you two to one, is that right?'
"Affirmative.

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.

I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative party because it is the party of nonpolitics, of resistance to politics. I have seen how many of the evils of life - failure, loneliness, fear, boredom, inability to communicate - are ineradicable by political means, and that attempts so to eradicate them are disastrous.

I've been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But those first fifteen years didn't produce much of great interest. I mean, it embarrasses me very much to look back on my early poems
very few lines of any merit at all and lots of affectation. But there were quite a lot of them. That's a point in one's favor.

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

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

There was no excuse which didn't consist of inexcusable.