Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.
Kingsley Amis
Image
Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
Kingsley Amis
Image
It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.
Kingsley Amis
Image
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
Image
It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
Kingsley Amis
Image
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
Image
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
Kingsley Amis
Image
More always means worse.
Kingsley Amis
Image
It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction.
Kingsley Amis
Image
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
Image
A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for.
Kingsley Amis
Image
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
Image
Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.
Kingsley Amis
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.
Kingsley Amis
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
Kingsley Amis