Literary Birthday – 16 April – Kingsley Amis

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

10 Kingsley Amis Quotes

Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.
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.
No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.
No writer, especially a young and unknown writer, resents publicity of any kind—whatever he may say.
If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.
The novelist always has favourites, and often he’s a minor character.
It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
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.
Writing for me is to a large extent self-entertainment, and the only child is driven to do that.
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. 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. His books include the title, Lucky Jim.