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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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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
Wrong
Point
Around
Orbit
Enough
Critic
Must
Critics
Time
Remains
Demand
Stay

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.
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Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
Kingsley Amis
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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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More always means worse.
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Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.
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A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for.
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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.
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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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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!
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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It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
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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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
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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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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.
Kingsley Amis
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He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.
Kingsley Amis
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Man's love is of man's life a thing apartGirls aren't like that.
Kingsley Amis