Kingsley Amis > Quotes

“If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.”
― Kingsley Amis

“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.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“... 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.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

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

“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.”
― Kingsley Amis

“Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“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.”
― Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis

“Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“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.”
― Kingsley Amis

“Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.”
― Kingsley Amis

“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.”
― Kingsley Amis

“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.”
― Kingsley Amis, Jake's Thing

“Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence. ”
― Kingsley Amis

“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 adolescence, 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.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“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.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“He thought how much he liked her and had in common with her, and how much she'd like and have in common with him if she only knew him.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'

"Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.”
― Kingsley Amis

“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.”
― Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis

“He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.”
― Kingsley Amis, One Fat Englishman

“For the first time he really felt that it was no use trying to save those who fundamentally would rather not be saved.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“Then, Patrick, you do feel it too? You do feel ... something? It would be so bleak if you felt nothing. That's what scares women, you know.'

'I do know, and you needn't be scared. I feel something all right.'

'Promise me you'll always treat me as a person.'

'I promise.'

'Promises are so easily given.'

'I'll 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.”
― Kingsley Amis, Difficulties With Girls

“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.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“For a moment he felt like devoting the next ten years to working his way to a position as art critic on purpose to review Bertrand's work unfavorably.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.”
― Kingsley Amis, The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage

“It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.”
― Kingsley Amis

“Why couldn’t they leave him alone? Why couldn’t every single one of them without exception whatsoever just go right away from where he was and leave him alone?”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.”
― Kingsley Amis

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

“There was no excuse which didn't consist of inexcusable.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim