1
Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.Kingsley Amis
2
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'" Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.Kingsley Amis
3
Death has this much to be said for it: You don't have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you–free.Kingsley Amis
4
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.Kingsley Amis
5
Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.Kingsley Amis
6
Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.Kingsley Amis
7
... all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face.Kingsley Amis
8
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.Kingsley Amis
9
Then, Patrick, you do feel it too? You do feel. . something? It would be so bleak if you felt nothing. That's what scares women, you know.'' I do know, and you needn't be scared. I feel something all right.'' Promise me you'll always treat me as a person.'' I promise.'' Promises are so easily given.'' I'll fulfill this one. Let me show you.' After a shaky start he was comfortably in the swing of it, having recognised he was on familiar ground after all. Experience had brought him to see that this kind of thing was nothing more than the levying of cock-tax, was reasonable and normal, in fact, even though some other parts of experience strongly suggested that what he had shelled out so far was only a down payment.Kingsley Amis
10
Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months of years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.Kingsley Amis
11
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
12
It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.Kingsley Amis
13
Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.Kingsley Amis
14
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
15
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
16
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.Kingsley Amis
17
America takes her writers too seriously.Kingsley Amis
18
Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.Kingsley Amis
19
There are other things to a woman than taking her to bed.Kingsley Amis
20
I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it.Kingsley Amis
21
Some mysterious revenge of nature has seen to it that no poem in praise of drink or tobacco (or snuff, if any) can succeed.Kingsley Amis
22
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the Church he currently did not attend was Catholic.Kingsley Amis