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
With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.
The world that seemed so various and new, well, it does contract. One's burning desire to investigate human behavior, and to make, or imply, statements about it, does fall off. And so one does find that early works are full of energy and also full of vulgarity, crudity, and incompetence, and later works are more carefully finished, and in that sense better literary products. But . . . there's often a freshness that is missing in later works--for every gain there's a loss. I think it evens out in that way.
When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European ...
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.