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
It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time.
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
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.
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.
Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.
Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch.
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.
The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what's funny is one of them.
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.
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.
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.