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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
Training
Needed
Wanted
Preliminary

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A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for.
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Be glad you're fifty - andThat you got there while things were nice,In a world worth looking at twice.So here's wishing you many more years,But not all that many. Cheers!
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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.
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Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.
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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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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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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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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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Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
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It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
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Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go 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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Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
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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'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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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
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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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It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.
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Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what's more you want to go on fitting it.
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Man's love is of man's life a thing apartGirls aren't like that.
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