Kingsley Amis Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Cats are only human, they have their faults.

Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

More always means worse.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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

Death has this much to be said for it: You don't have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free.

Some mysterious revenge of nature has seen to it that no poem in praise of drink or tobacco (or snuff, if any) can succeed.