Quotes from Kingsley Amis

Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food.

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.

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.

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.

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

For a man as keen as he on getting into bed with women, keeping hidden the full enormity of his fatness was a chronic problem. Its most acute form naturally came up when someone new had to be hustled or cajoled past the point of no return. That point tended to get later and later as his belly waxed.

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.

Yes. Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what's more you want to go on fitting it. The old hopeless passion, isn't it?

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

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

the gaps in sensitivity displayed are vast. Concepts that have not often been surpassed For ignorance or downright nastiness - That the habit of indifference is less Destructive than the embrace of love, that crimes Are paid for never or a thousand times, That the gentle come to grief - all these are forced Into scenes, dialogue, comments, and endorsed By the main action, manifesting there An inhumanity beyond despair.

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

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.

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

America takes her writers too seriously.

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.

The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that is should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree.

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.

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

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.

Science fiction's] most important use, I submit, is a means of dramatizing social inquiry, as providing a fictional mode in which cultural tendencies can be isolated and judged.

SF's NO GOOD! They bellow 'til we're deaf But =this= is good Well, then, it's not SF!

Let complication thrive.

It is a poor mind that is never in conflict.