Kingsley Amis quotes:

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

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.

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)."

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

Cited by the author of 'Lucky Jim' as one of the most dismal depressing questions in the English language: "Shall we go straight in?"

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means ... the need to be left. I am driven to grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.

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

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

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

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.

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

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.

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

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

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

Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence

America takes her writers too seriously.

I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not.

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

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

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

The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.

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

education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.

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

[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.

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

Be glad you're fifty - andThat you got there while things were nice,In a world worth looking at twice.So here's wishing you many more years,But not all that many. Cheers!

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

Cats are only human, they have their faults.

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

Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap.

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

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.

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

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.

I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.

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

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.

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

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.

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

It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction.

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.

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.

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;Girls aren't like that.

Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.

More always means worse.

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.

Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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....

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.

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

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

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.

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 adolescense, 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.

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

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.