Anthony Burgess Quotes

119 Sourced Quotes

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
I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.

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
After all, what bit of money I've made has been made among mosquitoes and sand-flies, snakes in the bedroom, long monotonous damp heat, boredom, exasperation with native clerks. Who are these sweet stay-at-homes, sweet well-contents, to try and suck it out of me and feel aggrieved if they can't have it?

Anthony Burgess
Sultan Aladdin... had few illusions about his own people: amiable, well-favoured, courteous, they loved rest better than industry,... their function was to remind the toiling Chinese, Indians and British of the ultimate vanity of labour.

Anthony Burgess
With such exquisite women there is little need for aphrodisiacs.

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
'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
In Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honour a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.

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
She gave the lie to the European superstition — chiefly a missionary superstition — that the women of the East are downtrodden.

Anthony Burgess