Quotes from Kingsley Amis

Outside every fat man there is an even fatter man trying to close in.

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

Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.

Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'"Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.

There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

There was no excuse which didn't consist of inexcusable.

When the bishop farted we were amused to hear about it. Should the ploughboy find treasure we must be told. But when the ploughboy farts... er... keep it to yourself.

Cited by the author of 'Lucky Jim' as one of the most dismal depressing questions in the English language: Shall we go straight in?

No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare

Rogers} sexual aim is "to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature who is the opposite of these: to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.

They went outside and stood where a sign used to say Taxi and now said Taxi/Tacsi for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X before.

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

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

Nothing short of physical handicap has ever made anybody turn over a new leaf.

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.

he had forgotten, if he had ever begun to understand, how small a part people played in others' lives and how little they knew about them, even if they saw them every day.

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

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

Some mysterious revenge of nature has seen to it that no poem in praise of drink or tobacco (or snuff, if any) can succeed.

he could sense her breathing, her temple against his jaw and her shoulder under his hand were warm, her hair smelt of well-brushed hair, he could feel the presence of her body...

I don't allow people of your sort to stand in my way. That's what you're leaving out of account. I'm having Christine because it's my right. Do you understand that? If I'm after something, I don't care what I do to make sure that I get it. That's the only law I abide by; it's the only was to get things in this world...With me you just haven't a hope in hell.

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.

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.