Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
Is literature more important than hurting people? You can't argue that. You can't say it. It's impossible.
The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.
Literature matters because it is how humanity, with all its losses and joys, can become a work of art.
My world is about stories that entertain; emotions that move; people you’ll remember; literature that matters.
I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.
You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but.
God bless my father, but he always spoke in this continental, literary accent, probably because he was a professor of comparative literature and he made the decision to speak with distinction.
My family pleaded with me to forget literature and do something sensible, such as find some sort of useful work.
The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.
Seeds and nuts are indispensable for cardiovascular health. The protective properties of nuts against coronary heart disease were first recognized in the early 1990s, and a strong body of literature has followed, confirming these original findings.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?
There's a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters.
Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
