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. A country GP’s visit was hardly on that scale, but the principle held.

— Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis Quotes

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

— 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

Unquestioning devotion to authenticity is, in any department of life, a mark of the naive-or worse.

— Kingsley Amis

Everybody had been in their twenties then; well, round about thirty. Now, from round about seventy, all those years of maturity or the prime of life or whatever you called it looked like an interval between two bouts of vomiting.

— Kingsley Amis

Time, plenty of it came to the rescue here: Kelly was to engage in self-expression. In Jake’s vocabulary this was a vague term applied to activities like swearing and children’s art but in the present context it evidently meant something more specific. The girl at once left her chair, sat down on one of the more affluent patches of carpet and clasped her knees.

— Kingsley Amis

If you want to finish the evening with your usual number of fingers, do any cutting-up, peel-slicing and the like before you have had more than a couple of drinks, preferably before your first.

— Kingsley Amis

Beware of curiously shaped or oddly-got-up bottles: you are likely to be paying for the parcel rather than what is wrapped up in it.

— Kingsley Amis

If you want to behave better and feel better, the only absolutely certain method is drinking less. But to find out how to do that, you will have to find a more expert expert than I shall ever be.

— Kingsley Amis

You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation.

— Kingsley Amis

To be sure about nonsense he had to be able to classify it, assign it to a family tree of liberal nonsense, humanist-humanitarian nonsense, academic nonsense, Protestant nonsense, Freudian nonsense and so on.

— Kingsley Amis

The trouble with the hypochondriac is that he will be wrong about his condition nine hundred and ninety-nine times.

— Kingsley Amis

I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not.

— Kingsley Amis

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. A country GP’s visit was hardly on that scale, but the principle held.

— Kingsley Amis

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn. – SAMUEL JOHNSON.

— Kingsley Amis

Bowen looked nervously about for peasants. It would be unendurable if they all turned out to be full of instinctive wisdom and natural good manners and unself-conscious grace and a deep, articulate understanding of death.

— Kingsley Amis

Let complication thrive.

— Kingsley Amis

It is a poor mind that is never in conflict.

— Kingsley Amis

Up to a point go for quantity rather than quality. Most people would rather have two glasses of ordinary decent port than one of a rare vintage.

— Kingsley Amis

A man’s sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.

— Kingsley Amis

He disliked this girl and her boy-friend so much that he couldn’t understand why they didn’t dislike each other.

— Kingsley Amis
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