Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBEwas an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism. According to his biographer, Zachary Leader, Amis was "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." He is the father of British novelist Martin Amis...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 April 1922
CityLondon, England
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.
I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.
Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.
Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.
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.
Outside every fat man there is an even fatter man trying to close in.
A blonde girl wearing a man's shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' "Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
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.
Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.
I wish I could have a little tape-and-loudspeaker arrangement sewn into the binding of this magazine, to be triggered off by the light reflected from the reader's eyes on to this part of the page, and set to bawl out at several bels: MORE WILL MEAN WORSE.