Quotes from Kingsley Amis

In it {a film Peter saw} a sadistic sergeant broke the spirit of soldier in a military prison by beating him up at systematically random intervals, from more than a day down to a quarter of an hour, so that the victim never knew when the next attack was coming, never felt safe. Life with Muriel, it seemed to Peter, had over the last seven or eight years turned into a decreasingly bearable version of that.

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.

Shakespeare It is fair, though hardly very important, that to say or imply that the man of this name is not our greatest writer marks a second-rate person at best.

Love is a finding-out: Our walk to the bedroom (Hand in hand, eye to eye) Up a stair of marble Or decently scrubbed boards, As much as what we do In our abandonment, Teaches us who we are And what we are, and what Life itself is.

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.

Shuddering in his efforts to repress a yawn of nervousness, he asked in his flat northern voice: How´s Margaret these days? The other´s clay-like features changed indefinably as his attention, like a squadron of slow old battleships, began wheeling to face this new phenomenon , and in a moment or two he was able to say: Margaret.

I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative party because it is the party of nonpolitics, of resistance to politics. I have seen how many of the evils of life — failure, loneliness, fear, boredom, inability to communicate — are ineradicable by political means, and that attempts so to eradicate them are disastrous.

A sudden douche of terror then squirted itself all over Dixon. After a moment he realized that this was because he had a plan and was about to carry it out. He panted a little with the enormity of it, then drained his glass and said quaveringly: Here goes then. Good-bye for now.

See that car?' It was Welch's, parked slightly nearer one kerb than the other

Lyall felt he could not say which of two things was harder to put up with, the Abbot's conversational style, with its bland coherence and assumption of severely limited cogitative powers in the hearer, or his recurrent look of pleased surprise as each fresh piece of evidence of his wisdom or moral worth turned up, but between them they were likely to implant in certain minds a hardy seed of revolt.

To write things down as luck wasn't the same as writing them off as non-existent or in some way beneath consideration.

I was wondering about the library,' Welch said, rocking to and fro on his heels. He was looking more than usually wild-eyed and dishevelled this morning. There was a small golden emblem on his tie resembling some heraldic device or other, but proving on closer scrutiny to be congealed egg-yolk. Substantial traces of the same nutritive were to be seen round his mouth, which was now ajar.

Christmas dinner was something of a success; it passed off, at any rate, without bloodshed.

It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.

With all respect to James Bond, a martini should be stirred, not shaken.

spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart Or squash it flat? - a Bookshop Idyll

The bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation, Dixon thought. 'You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation', he said.

Malcolm said nothing to that. He swayed from side to side in his chair as a way of suggesting that life held many such small puzzles.

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.

Whatever passably decent treatment Margaret had had from him was the result of a temporary victory of fear over irritation and/or pity over boredom.

They made a silly mistake though,' the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory.

No indeed, poems were not made out of intentions.