Kingsley Amis Quotes (1922-1995)

“Life is mainly grief and labour. Two things get you through. Chortling when it hits your neighbour, Whingeing when it's you.”

“In the old days a lot of people, men as well as women, didn't quite know what to expect from sex so they didn't worry when it didn't work too well.”

“It is not quite a political bad dream, or metaphysical adventure, or cosmic comedy in the form of a spy story, but it has something of all these. Anyway, it is unique, and also, what is not all that much easier to bring about, magnetically readable … James Bond and Gabriel Syme differ in innumerable ways, but they share a quality of romance, of color and chivalry, almost of myth, that attracts me a lot more deeply than anything about the down-to-earth and up-to-the-minute heroes of writers like Len Deighton and John Le Carré.”

“Wells occupies an honoured place in science fiction. Without him, indeed, I can't see how any of it could have happened.”

“I often feel I will never pick up a book by Orwell again until I have read a frank discussion of the dishonesty and hysteria that mar some of his best work.”

“[John D Macdonald] is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels.”

“My own experience in reading Dickens...is to be bounced between violent admiration and violent distaste almost every couple of paragraphs, and this is too uncomfortable a condition to be much alleviated by an inward recital of one's duty not to be fastidious, to gulp the stuff down in gobbets like a man.”