… all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made...

I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it.

He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: ‘You atheist?'”Kingsley Amis: ‘Well, yes, but it’s more that I hate him.

Women don’t seem to think it’s good enough; They write about it

America takes her writers too seriously.

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.

If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.

The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disappointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world,...

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to...

It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.

education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.

I want a dish to taste good, rather than to have been seethed in pig’s milk and served wrapped in a rhubarb leaf with grated thistle root.

There are other things to a woman than taking her to bed.

No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.

Lyall felt he could not say which of two things was harder to put up with, the Abbot’s conversational style, with its bland coherence and assumption of severely limited cogitative powers in the hearer, or...

It scored right away with me by being the smooth, fine-grained sort, not the coarse, flaky, dry-on-the-outside rubbish full of chunks of gut and gristle to testify to its authenticity.

If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.

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

Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means… the need to be left. I am driven to grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of...

Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.

I sometimes feel that more lousy dishes are presented under the banner of pate than any other.

Then, Patrick, you do feel it too? You do feel … something? It would be so bleak if you felt nothing. That’s what scares women, you know.”I do know, and you needn’t be scared. I...

No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare

Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.

He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.

A man’s sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to...

To be sure about nonsense he had to be able to classify it, assign it to a family tree of liberal nonsense, humanist-humanitarian nonsense, academic nonsense, Protestant nonsense, Freudian nonsense and so on.

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

Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay...

A German wine label is one of the things life’s too short for.

One of the great benefits of organised religion is that you can be forgiven your sins, which must be a wonderful thing. I mean, I carry my sins around with me, there’s nobody there to...

A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night and then as its mausoleum.

It’s never pleasant to have one’s unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.

Time, plenty of it came to the rescue here: Kelly was to engage in self-expression. In Jake’s vocabulary this was a vague term applied to activities like swearing and children’s art but in the present...

It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.

Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a...

I enjoy talking to you more than anybody else because I never feel I am giving myself away and so can admit to shady, dishonest, crawling, cowardly, unjust, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, perverted and generally shameful...

I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not.

Everybody had been in their twenties then; well, round about thirty. Now, from round about seventy, all those years of maturity or the prime of life or whatever you called it looked like an interval...

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.

Death has this much to be said for it:You don’t have to get out of bed for it.Wherever you happen to beThey bring it to you—free.

Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good...