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Self criticism must be my guide to action, and the first rule for its employment is that in itself it is not a virtue, only a procedure.

Kingsley Amis

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Kingsley Amis
Age: 73 †
Born: 1922
Born: April 16
Died: 1995
Died: October 22
Autobiographer
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Writer
Clapham Common Ward
Sir Kingsley William Amis
Kingsley William Amis
Self
Employment
First
Guide
Must
Guides
Criticism
Rule
Virtue
Action
Procedure
Firsts
Procedures

More quotes by Kingsley Amis

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Never despise a drink because it is easy to make and/or uses commercial mixes. Unquestioning devotion to authenticity is, in any department of life, a mark of the naive - or worse.
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Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.
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If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is.
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I've been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But those first fifteen years didn't produce much of great interest. I mean, it embarrasses me very much to look back on my early poems--very few lines of any merit at all and lots of affectation. But there were quite a lot of them. That's a point in one's favor.
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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.
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Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European.
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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.
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It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
Kingsley Amis
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Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.
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Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means ... the need to be left. I am driven to grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.
Kingsley Amis
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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.
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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
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Hangover cure: Rigorous sex, hydration, hot bath, then go up for half an hour in an open aeroplane. (needless to say, with a non-hungover person at the controls).
Kingsley Amis
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It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction.
Kingsley Amis
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I want a dish to taste good, rather than to have been seethed in pig's milk and served wrapped in a rhubarb leaf with grated thistle root.
Kingsley Amis
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Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
Kingsley Amis
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I am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen.
Kingsley Amis
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Man's love is of man's life a thing apartGirls aren't like that.
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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
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It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
Kingsley Amis