Anthony Burgess Quotes

119 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.

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
And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. 'You felt ill this afternoon,' he said, 'because you're getting better. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all.

Anthony Burgess
You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured! I was cured alright.

Anthony Burgess
It was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one's true feelings.

Anthony Burgess
It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.

Anthony Burgess
Men are influenced by big loud empty words, styes which swell the eyelids and impede vision of the truth.

Anthony Burgess
The snarling, whining, pampered, analphabetic humanoids of Hollywood emerge as garbage irrelevantly gilded with adventitious photogeneity.

Anthony Burgess
How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.

Anthony Burgess
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

Anthony Burgess
Any kind of discourse which has a flavour of the British ruling class, so powerful is ancestral memory, must be strenuously avoided.

Anthony Burgess
'Ass' for 'arse' does not seem to represent a willingness, on British lines, to make the word arhotic; rather it is a puritanical substitution which forces a real ass to become a donkey or burro.

Anthony Burgess
You have no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It's like having a totally efficient contraceptive.

Anthony Burgess
Out of the stones that life threw at him he made a labyrinth.

Anthony Burgess
As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.

Anthony Burgess
The East would always present that calm face of faint astonishment, unmoved at the anger, not understanding the bitterness.

Anthony Burgess
The Christian ecumenical movement will have reached its limit, meaning that Catholicism will have turned into Protestantism and Protestantism into agnosticism.... But Islam will not have lost any of its rigour....Supernature abhors a supervacuum. With the death of institutional Christianity will come the spread of Islam.

Anthony Burgess
Relief brought an aching desire to be sitting in a kedai with a large bottle of Tiger or Anchor or Carlsberg in front of him.

Anthony Burgess
That shut her up real horrorshow and lovely.

Anthony Burgess
I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.

Anthony Burgess
The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

Anthony Burgess
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE- and I said: 'That's a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?' Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high type preaching goloss: '- The attempt to impose upon a man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen-

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
It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original — with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.

Anthony Burgess