Yevgeny Yevtushenko: ‘You atheist?'”Kingsley Amis: ‘Well, yes, but it’s more that I hate him.
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.
If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.
education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
… 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 his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face.
When the bishop farted we were amused to hear about it. Should the ploughboy find treasure we must be told. But when the ploughboy farts… er… keep it to yourself.
It’s never pleasant to have one’s unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.
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.
Bowen looked nervously about for peasants. It would be unendurable if they all turned out to be full of instinctive wisdom and natural good manners and unself-conscious grace and a deep, articulate understanding of death.
Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
There are other things to a woman than taking her to bed.
I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it.
Some mysterious revenge of nature has seen to it that no poem in praise of drink or tobacco (or snuff, if any) can succeed.
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the Church he currently did not attend was Catholic.