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 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.
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.
I enjoy talking to you more than anybody else because I never feel I am giving myself away and so can admit to shady, dishonest, crawling, cowardly, unjust, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, perverted and generally shameful feelings that I don't want anybody else to know about; but most of all because I am always on the verge of violent laughter when talking to you.If you were here, I keep thinking, we would spend the time in talk and drink and smoke and I should be laughing a lot of the time, and I should be enjoying myself a lot of the time.
No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare
Women don't seem to think it's good enough; They write about it
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.
No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.
It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.
It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.
His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.
He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.
Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.
There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.