"I thought of this while I drank some water, and then of other things which it suggested to me. As well as the private wash-day, tomorrow was inevitably going to be the time for holding a little private levee for guilt and anxiety and the rest of the old bunch. It wasn't so much doing what you wanted to do that was important, I ruminated, as wanting to do what you did. What about writing that down?"
-Kingsley Amis, That Uncertain Feeling
"Perhaps that was really what was bothering me. Wasn't I fussing too much, where in any case was the harm in a spot of the old adultery as long as you didn't take it too seriously, where was the sense of humour I was so keen on vaunting to myself, where was the Lewis who was superior to things like sex, wasn't I letting the ancestral Welsh nonconfrmist puritanism make a crafty comeback in me after all these years of discredit? It would be nice to lay one's troubles at the door of John Calvin, the noted French reformer and theologian. But it wouldn't really stand up, none of it would. Others might find my problem no more than a trigger for uncontrollable laughter but, nonconformism or no nonconformism, not me, not just laughter."
- Kingsley Amis, That Uncertain Feeling
"The last step, and the hardest to take, in assessing any comic writer, is to assert what should be an obvious truth, but one which always shyly hides: humour is not an overlay to seriousness. Humour is the thing itself, compressed and intensified into a civil code."
—Clive James, "Kingsley without the women," Times Literary Supplement