Anthony Burgess Quotes

The downtrodden who are the great creators of slang hurl pithiness and colour at poverty and oppre...

The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress.

You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice....

What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad p...

A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence a...

And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You...

An eye for an eye, I say. If someone hits you you hit back, do you not? Why then should not the Stat...

Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Whe...

Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.

The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.

I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the w...

Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language

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

My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like ...

I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother.

I didn't think I experimented.

Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of a...

When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea.

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

By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and e...

There was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the way I could see it.

It may not be nice to be good, 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I ...

You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads ...

And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have i...

A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, ...

You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God.

To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cu...

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

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

You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you i...

And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that it ...

I was always on my oddy knocky.

Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing u...

But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, then the gover...

The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we ...

You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self ...

So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on sin...

The thrill of theft, of violence, the urge to live easy - is it worth it when we have undeniable pro...

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey...

Yes yes yes, there it was. Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be ...

They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted...

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

The heresy of an age of reason,' or some such slovos [words]. 'I see what is right and approve, but ...

Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.

Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, ...

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

Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's...

You're a romantic,” said Crabbe. “You expect too much. Reality's always dull, you know, but when we ...

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

That's the law, son. But you were never much of a one for following the law.

You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you i...

The heresy of an age of reason. I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off foreve...

...I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless...

I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enfor...

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

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle tha...

Oh? And what's so stinking about it?.

Badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bo...

Of course it was horrible,' smiled Dr. Branom. 'Violence is a very horrible thing. That's what you'r...

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...

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

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

Well, everything's a lesson, isn't it? Learning all the time, as you could say.

Minister: As I was saying, Alex, you can be instrumental in changing the public verdict. Do you unde...

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

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

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

Our subject is, you see, impelled towards the good by, paradoxically, being impelled towards evil. T...

Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they shoul...

A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.

It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn...

In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivatio...

People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to...

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

What sort of world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be m...

What's all this about sin, eh?''That,' I said, very sick. 'Using Ludwig van like that. He did no har...

The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penelogical theories. Cram criminals tog...

Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so ...

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

Dreams go by opposites I was once told.

Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed.

The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, ...

Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insince...