Top 80 Kingsley Amis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”

— Kingsley Amis

2. “If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.”

— Kingsley Amis

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

— Kingsley Amis

4. “A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil your lunch.”

— Kingsley Amis

5. “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

6. “Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap.”

— Kingsley Amis

7. “Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.”

— Kingsley Amis

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

— Kingsley Amis

9. “One of the great benefits of organised religion is that you can be forgiven your sins, which must be a wonderful thing. I mean, I carry my sins around with me, there’s nobody there to forgive them.”

— Kingsley Amis

10. “It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.”

— Kingsley Amis

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

— Kingsley Amis

12. “A German wine label is one of the things life’s too short for, a daunting testimony to that peculiar nation’s love of detail and organization.”

— Kingsley Amis

13. “I was never an Angry Young Man. I am angry only when I hit my thumb with a hammer.”

— Kingsley Amis

14. “Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.”

— Kingsley Amis

15. “The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disappointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must.”

— Kingsley Amis

16. “Twentieth century music is like paedophilia. No matter how persuasively and persistently its champions urge their cause, it will never be accepted by the public at large, who will continue to regard it with incomprehension, outrage and repugnance.”

— Kingsley Amis

17. “Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.”

— Kingsley Amis

18. “I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.”

— Kingsley Amis

19. “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.”

— Kingsley Amis

20. “A blonde girl wearing a man’s shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy.”

— Kingsley Amis

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

— Kingsley Amis

22. “More always means worse.”

— Kingsley Amis

23. “It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.”

— Kingsley Amis

24. “If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the war, it’s Workshop. After Youth, that is.”

— Kingsley Amis

25. “He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.”

— Kingsley Amis

26. “Cats are only human, they have their faults.”

— Kingsley Amis

27. “How wrong people always were when they said: ‘It’s better to know the worst than go on not knowing either way.’ No; they had it exactly the wrong way round. Tell me the truth, doctor, I’d sooner know. But only if the truth is what I want to hear.”

— Kingsley Amis

28. “Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.”

— Kingsley Amis

29. “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.”

— Kingsley Amis

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

— Kingsley Amis

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

31. “It’s a letdown if the comedian doesn’t finally actually really sit on his hat.”

— Kingsley Amis

32. “The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what’s funny is one of them.”

— Kingsley Amis

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

— Kingsley Amis

34. “Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.”

— Kingsley Amis

35. “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

36. “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

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

— Kingsley Amis

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

— Kingsley Amis

39. “Work was like cats were supposed to be: if you disliked and feared it and tried to keep out if its way, it knew at once and sought you out and jumped on your lap and climbed all over you to show how much it loved you. Please God, he thought, don’t let me die in harness.”

— Kingsley Amis

40. “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

41. “For the first time he really felt that it was no use trying to save those who fundamentally would rather not be saved.”

— Kingsley Amis

42. “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

43. “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.”

— Kingsley Amis

44. “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.”

— Kingsley Amis

45. “Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.”

— Kingsley Amis

46. “Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time.”

— Kingsley Amis

47. “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.”

— Kingsley Amis

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

— Kingsley Amis

49. “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

50. “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.”

— Kingsley Amis