Anthony Burgess Quotes

119 Sourced Quotes

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

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
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

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

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

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

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

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
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
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