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 More Quotes by Kingsley Amis More Quotes From Kingsley Amis 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. Kingsley Amis requirements degrees weight 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. Kingsley Amis hangover sadness jobs The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what's funny is one of them. Kingsley Amis rewards knowing may If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing. Kingsley Amis editing writing littles Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music. Kingsley Amis strikes terrible world A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch. Kingsley Amis lunch may breakfast 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 youth gone war Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go. Kingsley Amis letting-you-go love sex 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 drunk real men It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with. Kingsley Amis ends use natural Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them. Kingsley Amis women wonder men Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work. Kingsley Amis drink play may 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 faults knows firsts 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. Kingsley Amis loss fall thinking 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 reputation now-and-then conscious He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic. Kingsley Amis humorous faith funny 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. Kingsley Amis political party mean Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way. Kingsley Amis consciousness way When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time. Kingsley Amis motive starting thinking Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence. Kingsley Amis incompetence journalism laziness
