Anthony Burgess Quotes

119 Sourced Quotes

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

Anthony Burgess
Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.

Anthony Burgess
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

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
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

Anthony Burgess
Even the police discussed this violence as possibly coming within the scope of their terms of reference.

Anthony Burgess
The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.

Anthony Burgess
Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?

Anthony Burgess
Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

Anthony Burgess
It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.

Anthony Burgess
We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.

Anthony Burgess
A victim of bad medicine, bad air, bad food, farcical education, a despicable popular culture.

Anthony Burgess
Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.

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

Anthony Burgess
The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.

Anthony Burgess
Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.

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
I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.

Anthony Burgess
If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.

Anthony Burgess
As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.

Anthony Burgess
The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch.

Anthony Burgess
Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.

Anthony Burgess
I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.

Anthony Burgess
A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's supposed to be doing.

Anthony Burgess
But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold.

Anthony Burgess
What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.

Anthony Burgess
Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination.

Anthony Burgess
Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.

Anthony Burgess
Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

Anthony Burgess