Kingsley Amis

There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

Sir Kingsley William Amis (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, teacher, and father of novelist Martin Amis.

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• Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what's more you want to go on fitting it.
  • Lucky Jim (1954)

• There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
  • Lucky Jim (1954)

• More will mean worse.
  • Encounter magazine, (July 1960)

• It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.
  • One Fat Englishman (1963)

• If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is.
  • Jake's Thing (1978), p. 140

• There isn't another other sex.
  • Stanley and the Women (1984), p. 254

• Should you revisit us
  Stay a little longer
  And get to know the place...
  On local life we trust
  The resident witness
  Not the royal tourist.
  • "New Approach Needed", about the Second Coming, in A Look Round The Estate : Poems 1957-67 (1967), p. 27

• Be glad you're fifty — and
  That you got there while things were nice,
  In a world worth looking at twice.
  So here's wishing you many more years,
  But not all that many. Cheers!
  • "Ode to Me" in Collected Poems, 1944-1979 (1979), p. 134

• 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
  • "Phoenix too frequent" Critique of DH Lawrence, in What became of Jane Austin? 1956.