Literary Birthday – 16 April – Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis was born on 16 April 1922 and died on 22 October 1995.

10 Kingsley Amis Quotes

1. Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.
2. 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. …I go on until about eight-thirty pm and I always hate stopping.
3. No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.
4. No writer, especially a young and unknown writer, resents publicity of any kind—whatever he may say.
5. If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.
6. The novelist always has favourites, and often he’s a minor character.
7. It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
8. I’ve been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But those first fifteen 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 favour.
9. Writing for me is to a large extent self-entertainment, and the only child is driven to do that.
10. But you can’t imagine how much I miss the intellectual stimulus of teaching English literature to young people. More than I ever realised – I do miss it.

Kingsley Amis was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. At university he met the poet Philip Larkin, with whom he formed a deep friendship, with a quarter of Amis’s letters addressed to him. Amis was renowned as one of the finest English comic novelists of the second half of the 20th century. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, and social and literary criticism. His books include the title, Lucky Jim. He won the 1986 Booker for The Old Devils. He was the father of English novelist Martin Amis. Kingsley Amis was knighted in 1990.

Source for image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kingsley_Amis_in_early_middle_age.jpg
Click here for another photograph of the author.

by Amanda Patterson

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