Kingsley Amis Quotes

[W]hat's the point of growing a beard if you're not going to be a little bit free and easy?

As far back as she could remember, she had gone in for day-dreams about what clothes, jewellery and the like she would wear if, like her admired and adored Marie Antoinette, she were somehow to find herself facing public execution.

As soon as originality became important, the days of artistic merit or excellence were numbered.

[S]omething was being kept from him. But, short of scopolamine, hypnosis or wild horses, he knew he would never hear from her what it was.

The real trouble with liars […] was that there could never be any guarantee against their occasionally telling the truth.

'Oh, I see,' said Jenny. 'But you're just getting these men [New Age gurus] to help you all feel better. I thought when you talked about helping people you meant other people. You know, like the blind.'
'Isn't everybody blind, in one way or another?' asked Wendy.

Shitty things are always simple. Same as great things. Patrick Standish, in conversation.

He was short on the one attribute certain to meet the immediate respect of the rich — i.e. being rich — and must therefore obtrude deterrents against being buggered about.

It had even occurred to him that sticking firmly to one girl could be unethically used to obtain exemption from the sometimes gruelling task of promiscuity.

I was a shit when I met you. I still am in lots of ways. But because of you I've had to give up trying to be a dedicated, full-time shit. I couldn't make it, hadn't the strength of character. Which is a pity in a way, because when you fall back into the ranks of the failed shits or amateur shits or incidental shits you start taking on responsibility for other people.

You don't crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish […]. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes.

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

Any man in the company of two women is outnumbered four to one however amiable they may be.

[W]e're all trapped in a sort of conspiracy to pretend everybody's forgiven everybody else and nobody minds anything any more and we all know life's not like that but what can we do?

Should you revisit us
Stay a little longer
And get to know the place...
On local life we trust
The resident witness
Not the royal tourist.