Kingsley Amis (born 16 April 1922, died 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, and social and literary criticism. He was the father of English novelist Martin Amis.
Quotes:
- If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.
- No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.
- The novelist always has favorites, and often he’s a minor character.
- Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.
- It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
- Writing for me is to a large extent self-entertainment, and an only child is driven to do that.
- No writer, especially a young and unknown writer, resents publicity of any kind – whatever he may say.
- You can’t imagine how much I miss the intellectual stimulus of teaching English literature to young people. More than I ever realized – I do miss it.
- I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep up with what’s going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter. Then I go on until about eight-thirty PM and I always hate stopping.
- I’ve been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But those first 15 years didn’t produce much of great interest. I mean, it embarrasses me very much to look back on my early poems – very few lines of any merit at all and lots of affectation. But there were quite a lot of them. That’s a point in one’s favor.
Sextile 
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