Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Kingsley Amis (English Novelist, Poet)

Sir Kingsley Amis (1922–95) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and academic. His wife was the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard; his son was the novelist Martin Amis.

Born in London, Amis was educated at the City of London School and St John’s College-Oxford. He was a lecturer in English literature at University College, Swansea, 1948–61, and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1961–63.

Amis achieved popular success with his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954.) This high-spirited satire on middle-class and academic aspirations set in a provincial university became a classic of post-1945 British fiction. “Jim,” its comic anti-hero, is a well-intentioned junior history professor, who, hoping to impress the new chancellor, succeeds only in messing up everything he touches. “Jim” also featured as a small-town librarian in Amis’s That Uncertain Feeling (1955,) and as a provincial author abroad in I Like it Here (1958.)

Amis’s other notable works include The Old Devils (1986; Booker Prize,) The Folks that Live on the Hill (1990,) The Russian Girl (1992,) and You Can’t Do Both (1994.)

After the death of spy-novelist Ian Fleming, Amis wrote a James Bond novel, Colonel Sun (1968; pseudonym Robert Markham) and the first “007” critical appraisal The James Bond Dossier (1965.) He also published four books of poetry and wrote non-fiction works, including one on the history of science fiction.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Kingsley Amis

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.
Kingsley Amis
Topics: Wine

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.
Kingsley Amis
Topics: Politics, Politicians

On hangovers: He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.
Kingsley Amis
Topics: Alcohol

He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
Kingsley Amis
Topics: Churches, Religion

Self criticism must be my guide to action, and the first rule for its employment is that in itself it is not a virtue, only a procedure.
Kingsley Amis
Topics: Criticism

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
Topics: Wine

Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.
Kingsley Amis

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