Quote

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

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

More quotes by Kingsley Amis

Image
It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction.
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
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
Image
He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.
Kingsley Amis
Image
Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.
Kingsley Amis
Image
Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
Kingsley Amis
Image
It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
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
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
Image
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
Image
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.
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
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
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
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
Image
Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.
Kingsley Amis
Image
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
Image
Man's love is of man's life a thing apartGirls aren't like that.
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