Kingsley Amis
48 quotes
Biography
"If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing."
"Death has this much to be said for it:You don't have to get out of bed for it.Wherever you happen to beThey bring it to you—free."
"Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do."
"Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'"Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him."
"education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another."
"More will mean worse."
"Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, 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. The ideal of the 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. Its very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because it cannot work."
"A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch."
"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."
"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."
"[T]here was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones."
"A great British prime minister once remarked that the people were divided into two nations, the rich and the poor, and in effect that these had no knowledge of each other. One might say the same, perhaps, of those who live in parts of the world where segregation by races is practised. But these barriers, or the reasons for them, belong to a part of our history which is fortunately passing away. There is one barrier, however, which no amount of progress or tolerance or legislation can ever diminish. I'm talking about the barrier between the attractive and the unattractive."
"Friendship includes charity. But there's no charity in sex."
"It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children."
"He was short on the one attribute certain to meet the immediate respect of the rich — i.e. being rich — and must therefore obtrude deterrents against being buggered about."
"You can't screw the rich, something in Ronnie muttered as Miss Quick got off him with quite as much alacrity as she had got on him. You have to let them screw you. Or else you leave out screwing altogether."
"I was a shit when I met you. I still am in lots of ways. But because of you I've had to give up trying to be a dedicated, full-time shit. I couldn't make it, hadn't the strength of character. Which is a pity in a way, because when you fall back into the ranks of the failed shits or amateur shits or incidental shits you start taking on responsibility for other people."
"I told myself that I could soon start to relish the state of being alone […], only to find as usual that I was stuck with myself.[…] Two's company, which is bad enough in all conscience, but one's a crowd."
"From an outsider's point of view, a naked woman out of doors is either a sun-worshipper or a rape victim; a man in the same state is either a sexual criminal or a plain lunatic."
"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."
"The real trouble with liars […] was that there could never be any guarantee against their occasionally telling the truth."
"[I]t's human to choose any sort of path into the future rather than face the long road back to what you've left behind."
"He's taken to going off for hours at a time, wandering round those woods that lead off from the common apparently. Nothing there apart from trees and sexual maniacs."
"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."
"People who sound insincere all the time […] should not expect others to notice the difference when they try to sound insincere."