Anthony Burgess Quotes

119 Sourced Quotes

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

Anthony Burgess
The British... used to regard foreigners as either a comic turn or a sexual menace. To learn a European language... was, at best, to seek to acquire a sort of girls'-finishing-school ornament, at worst, to capitulate feebly to the enemy.

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

Anthony Burgess
Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.

Anthony Burgess
There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

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

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

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
He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.

Anthony Burgess
If the world is to be improved it must be by the exercise of individual charity.

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

Anthony Burgess
Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.

Anthony Burgess
Literature, by the way, may be defined as the aesthetic exploitation of language.

Anthony Burgess
I suppose the only real reason for travelling is to learn that all people are the same.

Anthony Burgess
If you reject family - which a mother holds together - as well as the ties of Church and State, is there anything left for you?

Anthony Burgess
Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!

Anthony Burgess
A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book... I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

Anthony Burgess
There is a profound middle-class nostalgia for the days of British protection.

Anthony Burgess
All that the Malays can do is run the police force and the army.... They are not fitted even to the lowlier mechanical skills, such as car maintenance. They are essentially a people who have been pulled out of the kampongs into the towns, and the town in Malaysia seems essentially a Chinese creation.

Anthony Burgess
I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.

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

Anthony Burgess
There was a certain creative excitement, expressed in glandular constrictions which he knew well.

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
As I walked towards travel, that illusion of liberation, I strangely felt myself walking back into childhood.

Anthony Burgess
An Egyptian priest... plays up the mystery of language to enhance his own power.

Anthony Burgess
The important thing is to get yourself born. You're entitled to that. But you're not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen.

Anthony Burgess
I watched the grey villages limp by, the wind tearing at torn posters of long-done events. What I needed, of course, was a drink.

Anthony Burgess
A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motorshow—full of potential, but temporarily inactive.

Anthony Burgess
Maugham was a mere visitor and did not have to take any language examinations; a civil servant like myself was forced to reach degree level in Malay.

Anthony Burgess
Slang... the home-made language of the ruled, not the rulers, the acted upon, the used, the used up. It is demotic poetry emerging in flashes of ironic insight.

Anthony Burgess