Explore Quotes by Kingsley Amis

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.

When I find someone I respect writing about an edgy, nervous wine that dithered in the glass, I cringe. When I hear someone I don't respect talking about an austere, unforgiving wine, I turn a bit austere and unforgiving myself. When I come across stuff like that and remember about the figs and bananas, I want to snigger uneasily. You can call a wine red, and dry, and strong, and pleasant. After that, watch out.

Cats are only human, they have their faults.

If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.

It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.

Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.

How wrong people always were when they said: 'It's better to know the worst than go on not knowing either way.' No; they had it exactly the wrong way round. Tell me the truth, doctor, I'd sooner know. But only if the truth is what I want to hear.

Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.

Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.

When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a s**t you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is and there is no use crying over spilt milk.

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.

The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what's funny is one of them.

I'll pour you the first one and after that, if you don't have one, it's your own f****** fault. You know where it is.

Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.