“I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it.”
Kingsley Amis“Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'"Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.”
Kingsley Amis“He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the Church he currently did not attend was Catholic.”
Kingsley Amis“Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.”
Kingsley Amis“Death has this much to be said for it:You don't have to get out of bed for it.Wherever you happen to beThey bring it to you—free.”
Kingsley Amis“Bowen looked nervously about for peasants. It would be unendurable if they all turned out to be full of instinctive wisdom and natural good manners and unself-conscious grace and a deep, articulate understanding of death.”
Kingsley Amis, I Like it Here“I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it.”
Kingsley Amis, The Green Man“There are other things to a woman than taking her to bed.”
Kingsley Amis, The Green Man“I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not.”
Kingsley Amis, The Green Man“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.”
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim“It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.”
Kingsley Amis, The Green Man