Kingsley Amis Quotes

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

[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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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... ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto. ~ Kingsley Amis

[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. ~ Kingsley Amis

More always means worse. ~ Kingsley Amis

America takes her writers too seriously. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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

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

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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 ~ Kingsley Amis

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

Kingsley could 'do' the sound of a brass band approaching on a foggy day. He could become the Metropolitan line train entering Edgware Road station. He could be four wrecked tramps coughing in a bus shelter (this was very demanding and once led to heart palpitations). To create the hiss and crackle of a wartime radio broadcast delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was for him scant problem (a tape of it, indeed, was played at his memorial meeting, where I was hugely honored to be among the speakers). The pièce de résistance, an attempt by British soldiers to start up a frozen two-ton truck on a windy morning 'somewhere in Germany,' was for special occasions only. One held one's breath as Kingsley emitted the first screech of the busted starting-key. His only slightly lesser vocal achievement - of a motor-bike yelling in mechanical agony - once caused a man who had just parked his own machine in the street to turn back anxiously and take a look. The old boy's imitation of an angry dog barking the words 'fuck off' was note-perfect. ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

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

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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? ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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

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

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

Let complication thrive. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

Well, my father [Kingsley Amis] was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it was good that I began when I was young and bold and foolish, otherwise I'd have become too self-conscious and aware of the weight of not having written anything yet. ~ Martin Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis
It was a dream I had last week
And some kind of record seemed vital.
I knew it wouldn't be much of a poem
But I love the title. ~ Wendy Cope

. . . 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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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? ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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

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?) ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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)." ~ Kingsley Amis

... 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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all. ~ Martin Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.) ~ Christopher Hitchens

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

Cats are only human, they have their faults. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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

It is a poor mind that is never in conflict. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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

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

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 ... ~ Kingsley Amis

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 ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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 ... ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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. ~ Kingsley Amis

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

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 ~ Kingsley Amis

I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.) ~ Martin Amis

It has been a great experience to act in Hollywood movies with actors like Ben Kingsley. ~ Navi Rawat

What is life to Spirit, is death to the ego. ~ Vivian Amis

After many ponderous experiments the first crematorium was opened in December 1920 in Petrograd. It could manage barely 120 bodies a month, and, in February 1921, cremated itself when the wooden roof caught fire. ~ Martin Amis

Have you noticed, now, the way people talk so loudly in snackbars and cinemas, how the shelved back gardens shudder with prodigies of talentlessness, drummers, penny-whistlers, vying transistors, the way you see and hear the curses and sign-language of high sexual drama at the bus-stops under ghosts of clouds, how life has come out of doors? And in the soaked pubs the old-timers wince and weather the canned rock. We talk louder to make ourselves heard. We will all be screamers soon. ~ Martin Amis

Hold on, hold on, hold on," said the Hooded Person of Unknown Gender. "Are you really here to slay a dragon?"

"Yes! Why else would I be so far from home?"

"Sightseeing?" suggested the Female. ~ Ness Kingsley

He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction. ~ Martin Amis

Don't BELIEVE everything you read and see on the socialmedia! Don't let LIKES & RT brainwash your mind, take control over your time and take you away from your life, family & responsibilities! ~ Lily Amis