Quotes by Kingsley Amis

“If you cant annoy somebody, theres 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.”

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

“No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare”

“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.”

“There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.”

“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.”

“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. 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.”

“Some closing of the gates is inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative power.”

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.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: You atheist?Kingsley Amis: Well, yes, but its more that I hate him.

Death has this much to be said for it:You dont have to get out of bed for it.Wherever you happen to beThey bring it to you—free.

If you cant annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.

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.

... 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.

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.

Then, Patrick, you do feel it too? You do feel ... something? It would be so bleak if you felt nothing. Thats what scares women, you know.I do know, and you neednt be scared. I feel something all right.Promise me youll always treat me as a person.I promise.Promises are so easily given.Ill 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.

Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months of years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.