72+ Kingsley Amis Quotes On Education, Drink And Roald Dahl

Kingsley Amis was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He was born in London in 1922 and is best known for his novel Lucky Jim, which was published in 1954. Amis was also a prominent member of the British literary movement known as the Angry Young Men. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Kingsley Amis on love, life, education.

Top 10 Kingsley Amis Quotes

1. 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.
2. If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
3. Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.
4. If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.
5. A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch.
6. Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.
7. It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
8. Hangover cure: Rigorous sex, hydration, hot bath, then "go up for half an hour in an open aeroplane. (needless to say, with a non-hungover person at the controls)."
9. He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
10. I sometimes feel that more lousy dishes are presented under the banner of pate than any other.

Kingsley Amis Short Quotes

• Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
• Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' "Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
• Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.
• It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.
• Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European.
• Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
• Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.
• Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.
• He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.
• If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.

Kingsley Amis Quotes About Love

Sex stops when you pull up your pants, Love never lets you go. — Kingsley Amis

Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what's more you want to go on fitting it. — Kingsley Amis

Work was like cats were supposed to be: if you disliked and feared it and tried to keep out if its way, it knew at once and sought you out and jumped on your lap and climbed all over you to show how much it loved you. Please God, he thought, don't let me die in harness. — Kingsley Amis

A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for, a daunting testimony to that peculiar nation's love of detail and organization. — Kingsley Amis

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;Girls aren't like that. — Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis Quotes About Life

A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for. — Kingsley Amis

... 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

Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work. — Kingsley Amis

No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children. — Kingsley Amis

It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children. — 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

Kingsley Amis Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

A blonde girl wearing a man's shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy. — Kingsley Amis

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

The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings. — Kingsley Amis

[Science fiction is] that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesised on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin. It is distinguished from pure fantasy by its need to achieve verisimilitude and win the 'willing suspension of disbelief' through scientific plausibility. — Kingsley Amis

I've been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But those first fifteen years didn't produce much of great interest. I mean, it embarrasses me very much to look back on my early poems--very few lines of any merit at all and lots of affectation. But there were quite a lot of them. That's a point in one's favor. — Kingsley Amis

The Scandinavians are dear people but they've never been what you might call bywords for wit and sparkle, have they? — Kingsley Amis

If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is. — Kingsley Amis

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. Its very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because it cannot work. — Kingsley Amis

Twentieth century music is like paedophilia. No matter how persuasively and persistently its champions urge their cause, it will never be accepted by the public at large, who will continue to regard it with incomprehension, outrage and repugnance. — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

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. — 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

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question. — Kingsley Amis

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. — 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

Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food. — Kingsley Amis

He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover. — Kingsley Amis

When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time. — Kingsley Amis

More always means worse. — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

Be glad you're fifty - andThat you got there while things were nice,In a world worth looking at twice.So here's wishing you many more years,But not all that many. Cheers! — Kingsley Amis

It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you. — Kingsley Amis

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

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

When I find someone I respect writing about an edgy, nervous wine that dithered in the glass, I cringe. When I hear someone I don't respect talking about an austere, unforgiving wine, I turn a bit austere and unforgiving myself. When I come across stuff like that and remember about the figs and bananas, I want to snigger uneasily. You can call a wine red, and dry, and strong, and pleasant. After that, watch out. — Kingsley Amis

Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another. — 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

Cats are only human, they have their faults. — Kingsley Amis

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics. — Kingsley Amis

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. — Kingsley Amis

Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap. — Kingsley Amis

We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it. — Kingsley Amis

It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction. — Kingsley Amis

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. — Kingsley Amis

Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way. — 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

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. — Kingsley Amis

I was never an Angry Young Man. I am angry only when I hit my thumb with a hammer. — Kingsley Amis

It scored right away with me by being the smooth, fine-grained sort, not the coarse flaky, dry-on-the-outside rubbish full of chunds of gut and gristle to testify to its authenticity. — Kingsley Amis

Life Lessons by Kingsley Amis

1. Kingsley Amis taught us to be resilient in the face of adversity and to never give up on our dreams. He also showed us that it is important to take risks and to be open to new experiences. Lastly, he demonstrated the importance of staying true to oneself and not letting external pressures dictate our decisions.