Anthony Burgess Quotes

119 Sourced Quotes

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

Anthony Burgess
Violence among young people... is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.

Anthony Burgess
If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

Anthony Burgess
Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

Anthony Burgess
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

Anthony Burgess
We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

Anthony Burgess
Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

Anthony Burgess
Australian English may be thought of as a kind of fossilised Cockney of the Dickensian era.

Anthony Burgess
It was all a matter of a Goddess — dark, hidden, deadly, horribly desirable.

Anthony Burgess
Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

Anthony Burgess
Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Anthony Burgess
Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned. The questioning of linguistic conventions is one of the main duties of what we call literature.

Anthony Burgess
I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

Anthony Burgess
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.

Anthony Burgess
The church stands that it may be battered, but the fists that batter know their own impotence.

Anthony Burgess
Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.

Anthony Burgess
If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.

Anthony Burgess
He would milk the white man.... The white man had more money than sense.

Anthony Burgess
I think art is sublimated libido. You can't be a eunuch priest, and you can't be a eunuch artist.

Anthony Burgess
With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.

Anthony Burgess
The word slang is vague and its etymology obscure. It suggests the slinging of odd stones or dollops of mud at the windows of the stately home of linguistic decorum.

Anthony Burgess
I take my title from the name the Jews have traditionally given the Roman Empire. You may expect to meet all manner of wickedness in what follows - pork-eating, lechery, adultery, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, the most ingenious varieties of cruelty, assassination, the worship of false gods and the sin of being uncircumcised.

Anthony Burgess
Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

Anthony Burgess
Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally — that was a man's life.

Anthony Burgess
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

Anthony Burgess