151 Quotes by Kingsley Amis

"I want a dish to taste good, rather than to have been seethed in pig's milk and served wrapped in a rhubarb leaf with grated thistle root."

"When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time."

"If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong."

"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."

"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"

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

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

"It scored right away with me by being the smooth, fine-grained sort, not the coarse flaky, dry-on-the-outside rubbish full of chunds of gut and gristle to testify to its authenticity."

"Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food."

"Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work."