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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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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
Preliminary
Training
Needed
Wanted

More quotes by Kingsley Amis

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Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
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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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Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
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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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He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
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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.
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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 no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
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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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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 am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen.
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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.
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A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for.
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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.
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It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
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It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction.
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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.
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It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.
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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.
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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.
Kingsley Amis