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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

[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.

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.