I Like It Here Quotes

“He put a fresh sheet in and, after spending a few moments wishing he were doing something quite different, typed:

Gregory: But this is really qutie farcical.

Like all the other lines of dialogue he had so far evolved, it struck him as not only in need of instant replacement, but as requiring a longish paragraph of negative stage direction in the faint hope of getting it said ordinarily, and not ordinarily in inverted commas, either. Experimentally, he typed:

(Say this without raising your chin or opening your eyes wide or tilting your face or putting on that look of vague affront you use when you think you are "underlining the emergence of a new balance of forces in the scheme of the action" like the producer told you or letting your mind focus more than you can help on sentences like "Mr. Recktham managed to breathe some life into the wooden and conventional part of Gregory" or putting any more expression into it than as if you were reading aloud something you thought was pretty boring (and not as if you were doing an imitation of someone on a stage reading aloud something he thought was pretty boring, either) or hesitating before or after "quite" or saying "fusskle" instead of "farcical".)

Breathing heavily, Bowen now x-ed out his original line of dialogue and typed:

Gregory: You're just pulling my leg.”
― Kingsley Amis, I Like It Here

“He thought to himself now that if ever he went into the brewing business his posters would have written across the top "Bowen's Beer", and then underneath that in the middle a picture of Mrs. Knowles driniking a lot of it and falling about, and then across the bottom in bold or salient lettering the words "Makes You Drunk".”
― Kingsley Amis, I Like It Here

“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.”
― Kingsley Amis, I Like It Here