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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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Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European.
Kingsley Amis
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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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We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time it is enough if he remains in orbit around it.
Kingsley Amis
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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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Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
Kingsley Amis
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If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.
Kingsley Amis
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I wish I could have a little tape-and-loudspeaker arrangement sewn into the binding of this magazine, to be triggered off by the light reflected from the reader's eyes on to this part of the page, and set to bawl out at several bels: MORE WILL MEAN WORSE.
Kingsley Amis
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He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
Kingsley Amis
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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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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
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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
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It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.
Kingsley Amis
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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.
Kingsley Amis
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
Kingsley Amis
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A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for.
Kingsley Amis
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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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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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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.
Kingsley Amis
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It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
Kingsley Amis
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Man's love is of man's life a thing apartGirls aren't like that.
Kingsley Amis