Kingsley Amis

"More will mean worse."

"A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch."

"Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."

"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."

"[T]here was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones."

"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; Girls aren't like that."

"A great British prime minister once remarked that the people were divided into two nations, the rich and the poor, and in effect that these had no knowledge of each other. One might say the same, perhaps, of those who live in parts of the world where segregation by races is practised. But these barriers, or the reasons for them, belong to a part of our history which is fortunately passing away. There is one barrier, however, which no amount of progress or tolerance or legislation can ever diminish. I'm talking about the barrier between the attractive and the unattractive."

"Friendship includes charity. But there's no charity in sex."

"'You're still the same girl. What people do doesn't change their nature.' She shook her head.[…] 'What they do is their nature,' she said."

"It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children."

"He was short on the one attribute certain to meet the immediate respect of the rich — i.e. being rich — and must therefore obtrude deterrents against being buggered about."

"You can't screw the rich, something in Ronnie muttered as Miss Quick got off him with quite as much alacrity as she had got on him. You have to let them screw you. Or else you leave out screwing altogether."

"I was a shit when I met you. I still am in lots of ways. But because of you I've had to give up trying to be a dedicated, full-time shit. I couldn't make it, hadn't the strength of character. Which is a pity in a way, because when you fall back into the ranks of the failed shits or amateur shits or incidental shits you start taking on responsibility for other people."

"Should you revisit us Stay a little longer And get to know the place... On local life we trust The resident witness Not the royal tourist."

"I told myself that I could soon start to relish the state of being alone […], only to find as usual that I was stuck with myself.[…] Two's company, which is bad enough in all conscience, but one's a crowd."

"From an outsider's point of view, a naked woman out of doors is either a sun-worshipper or a rape victim; a man in the same state is either a sexual criminal or a plain lunatic."

"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."

"The real trouble with liars […] was that there could never be any guarantee against their occasionally telling the truth."

"[I]t's human to choose any sort of path into the future rather than face the long road back to what you've left behind."

"He's taken to going off for hours at a time, wandering round those woods that lead off from the common apparently. Nothing there apart from trees and sexual maniacs."

"As far back as she could remember, she had gone in for day-dreams about what clothes, jewellery and the like she would wear if, like her admired and adored Marie Antoinette, she were somehow to find herself facing public execution."

"People who sound insincere all the time […] should not expect others to notice the difference when they try to sound insincere."

"[S]omething was being kept from him. But, short of scopolamine, hypnosis or wild horses, he knew he would never hear from her what it was."

"Then, because it was every cinematic doctor's exit line, the doctor added, "I'll see myself out.""

"If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the War, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is."

"'What's that stuff they put in ships to keep them from going all over the place?' 'What? Oh … ballast?' 'That's right. People's sex drives are like ballast, they keep them steady. It sounds wrong, but they do.'"

"Be glad you're fifty — and That 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!"

"The rewards for being sane are not very many but knowing what's funny is one of them."

"Internally, in itself, madness is an artistic desert. Nothing of any general interest can be said about it. Like sex. But the effects it has on the world outside it can be very interesting indeed. It has no other valid literary use."

"There isn't another other sex."

"It’s quite a problem for retired people, I do see. All of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast. All those hours with nothing to stay sober for. Or nothing to naturally stay sober during, if you see what I…We used to laugh at Malcolm’s dad, the way he used to mark up the wireless programs in Radio Times in different-coloured pencils. Never caught him listening to any of them but it was an hour taken care of."

"While he was climbing the litter-strewn steps his left ball gave a sharp twinge, on and off like a light-switch, then again after he had sat down. Nothing. Just one of the aches and pains that come and go. No significance."

"Any man in the company of two women is outnumbered four to one however amiable they may be."

"'Oh, I see,' said Jenny. 'But you're just getting these men [New Age gurus] to help you all feel better. I thought when you talked about helping people you meant other people. You know, like the blind.' 'Isn't everybody blind, in one way or another?' asked Wendy."

"'Shitty things are always simple. Same as great things. Patrick Standish, in conversation.'"

"Nothing divided people more deeply than how they felt about cats."

"Nobody, however learned, however wise, can stand in the way of regress."

"You don't crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish […]. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes."

"[B]eing a writer is much more important to the person, to the writer, than being anything else is to the person being it.[…] More than being a painter is to the painter or being a composer of music is to the composer, more than being anything else except maybe being a priest."

"As soon as originality became important, the days of artistic merit or excellence were numbered."

"It had even occurred to him that sticking firmly to one girl could be unethically used to obtain exemption from the sometimes gruelling task of promiscuity."

"[W]hat's the point of growing a beard if you're not going to be a little bit free and easy?"

"That stuff you read didn't condition you, you chose it because it was what you wanted to hear."

"'Do you think that's altogether fair to him, to Jimmie, that is? I realize you've known him longer than I have.' 'Maybe, maybe not. You know, darling, I think you're sometimes a bit carried away by fairness.'"

"[W]e're all trapped in a sort of conspiracy to pretend everybody's forgiven everybody else and nobody minds anything any more and we all know life's not like that but what can we do?"

"Jimmie had said more than once that the upper class enjoyed the true freedom of not caring what anybody else thought about them. Like children perhaps. If that had a bearing, there might be a connection with the boyishness of such people noted by some outside observers, including Indians under the British Raj and later."

"It isn't class differences that keep people apart, it's thinking they bloody matter."