English novelist, poet & critic (1922-1995)
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
"Phoenix Too Frequent", What Became of Jane Austen?
A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch.
KINGSLEY AMIS
attributed, Aren't We Due a Royalty Statement?
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
Lucky Jim
Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.
KINGSLEY AMIS
The Amis Collection: Selected Non-fiction
To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me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
The Amis Collection: Selected Non-fiction
Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.
KINGSLEY AMIS
"A Bookshop Idyll", A Case of Samples
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
The Paris Review, winter 1975
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
Sunday Telegraph, Jul. 2, 1967
They're laughing because they're mad, too mad to be able to tell what's funny any more. The rewards for being sane may not be very many but knowing what's funny is one of them.
KINGSLEY AMIS
Stanley and the Women
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
Lucky Jim
It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
KINGSLEY AMIS
The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage
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
interview, The Paris Review, winter 1975
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
The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage