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Authors Kingsley Amis

…you must never make one character laugh at what another says or does.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The Paris Review Kingsley Amis The Paris Review 1979
Love of life, like all human talents, weakens with age. But love of language, in his case, never did begin to fade.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The Guardian Martin Amis The Guardian 2011
One of the commonest complaints about Amis’s novels (as opposed to his poems, interestingly) is that for all their surface engagement with familiar life they are in fact cold-hearted.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The Guardian Andrew Motion The Guardian 2006

His universe is claustrophobically human, and his ambition and reputation alike remain in thrall to the weary concept of the “comic novel”.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New Yorker John Updike New Yorker 1979
The old, robust masculine tradition of British comedy from Fielding and Smollett continues in our own vernacular.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New Yorker V. S. Pritchett New Yorker 1987

The Old Devils

I don’t say that the drunk man is the real man, and the sober man merely a shell. But you find out something different about people when they’re drunk. Of course, you sometimes find that they’re not different at all—that you merely get more of the same, perhaps said rather more loudly and incoherently, but basically the same. Other people change.

Read the full piece at The Paris Review Kingsley Amis The Paris Review 1979
Gore Vidal

…on the rare occasions when I do pick up Vidal, whose early books I enjoyed before he was as celebrated as he is now, he seems to me to suffer from American cleverness: the fear of being thought stupid, or dull, or behind the times.

Read the full piece at The Paris Review Kingsley Amis The Paris Review 1975