Quote

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

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
Difficult
Art
Thing
Think
Thinking
European
Elements
American

More quotes by 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
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
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
Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.
Kingsley Amis
Image
It's a letdown if the comedian doesn't finally actually really sit on his hat.
Kingsley Amis
Image
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
Image
Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto.
Kingsley Amis
Image
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
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
Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.
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
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 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
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
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
It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
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
A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for.
Kingsley Amis
Image
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
Image
Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
Kingsley Amis