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

More quotes by Kingsley Amis

Image
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.
Kingsley Amis
Image
Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.
Kingsley Amis
Image
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
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
Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European.
Kingsley Amis
Image
It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction.
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
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
It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.
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
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.
Kingsley Amis
Image
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis
Image
It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
Kingsley Amis
Image
If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.
Kingsley Amis
Image
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.
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
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
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
Image
He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.
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