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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
Criticism
Rule
Virtue
Action
Procedure
Firsts
Procedures
Self
Employment
First
Guide
Must
Guides

More quotes by Kingsley Amis

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It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.
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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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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.
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Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
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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.
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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.
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
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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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More always means worse.
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If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.
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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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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).
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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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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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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.
Kingsley Amis
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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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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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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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It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
Kingsley Amis
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It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
Kingsley Amis