Anthony Burgess Quotations

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

It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

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.

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

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.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

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

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

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

If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

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

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

There is lots of scope for European banking deals.

When we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract

Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?

Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.

The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.

Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.

Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

Hitler was a teetotalitarian.

When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

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.

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.

It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.

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

Every dogma has its day.

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

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.

If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.

The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.

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

Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.

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.

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.

As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God; though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties.

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

The essence of pop stardom is immaturity - a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.

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

If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

Life is, of course, terrible.

Well, well, well, well. If it isn't fat, stinking billygoat Billy-Boy in poison. How art thou, thy globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou.

To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance.

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.

Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?

All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.

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

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

But what I do I do because I like to do.

When the State withers, humanity flowers.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.

...but we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure...

And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.

All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.

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.

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.

All novels are experimental.

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.

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

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

A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.

The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk around my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.

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.

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

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

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

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

A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.

The writer's life seethes within but not without.

I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.

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.

But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the CAUSE of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of GOODNESS, so why of the other shop?

Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.

Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.

That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.

I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.

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.

One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is...There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.

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.

Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.

You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.

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

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

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.

Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.

The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed.

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.

Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.