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Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European.

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
Thing
Think
Thinking
European
Elements
American
Difficult
Art

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Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.
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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).
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Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
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It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
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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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Man's love is of man's life a thing apartGirls aren't like that.
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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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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.
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
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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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He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
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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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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.
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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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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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