Quote

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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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
Shows
Supposed
Climbed
Thought
Tried
Jumped
Work
Please
Harness
Much
Loved
Lap
Way
Knew
Feared
Like
Dies
Sought
Show
Cats
Keep
Cat
Disliked

More quotes by Kingsley Amis

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If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis
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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
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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.
Kingsley Amis
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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.
Kingsley Amis
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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
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Hangover cure: Rigorous sex, hydration, hot bath, then go up for half an hour in an open aeroplane. (needless to say, with a non-hungover person at the controls).
Kingsley Amis
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More always means worse.
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.
Kingsley Amis
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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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Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.
Kingsley Amis
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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.
Kingsley Amis
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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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Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
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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Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
Kingsley Amis
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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.
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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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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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
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It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.
Kingsley Amis