Top 100 Anthony Burgess Quotes
#2. In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.
Anthony Burgess
#3. The next morning I woke up at oh eight oh oh hours, my brothers, and as I still felt shagged and fagged and fashed and bashed and my glazzies were stuck together real horrorshow with sleepglue, I thought I would not go to school.
Anthony Burgess
#4. Destruction, best expressed in this age in which I write as terrorism, is truly there for its own sake, but the pretense of religion or secular patriotism converts the destructive into the speciously creative.
Anthony Burgess
#5. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
Anthony Burgess
#7. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.
Anthony Burgess
#8. Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
Anthony Burgess
#9. Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
Anthony Burgess
#10. Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Anthony Burgess
#11. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.
Anthony Burgess
#12. Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess
#13. The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
Anthony Burgess
#14. The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.
Anthony Burgess
#15. 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.
Anthony Burgess
#16. It's funny how the colours of the like real world only seem real real when you viddy them on a screen
Anthony Burgess
#18. 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.
Anthony Burgess
#19. There comes a time, however, when violence is seen as juvenile and boring. It is the repartee of the stupid and ignorant.
Anthony Burgess
#21. Connection was the thing, whether through bed, bottle, grand inquisitorial session.
Anthony Burgess
#22. The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.
Anthony Burgess
#23. 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
#25. You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.
Anthony Burgess
#26. 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?
Anthony Burgess
#27. We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
Anthony Burgess
#28. 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?
Anthony Burgess
#29. Well, if they would not go to school they must still have their education. And education they had had.
Anthony Burgess
#30. A Clockwork Orange is too didactic to be artistic. It is not the novelist's job to preach; it is his job to show.
Anthony Burgess
#31. Then I wanted to sick up the gluey pie I'd had before the start of the evening, But I couldn't stand the sort of veshch, sicking all over the floor, so I held it back.
Anthony Burgess
#32. 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.
Anthony Burgess
#33. 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.
Anthony Burgess
#34. 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
#35. To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
Anthony Burgess
#36. I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother.
Anthony Burgess
#37. Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
Anthony Burgess
#38. Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.
Anthony Burgess
#39. 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.
Anthony Burgess
#40. You must take your chance boy. The choice has been all yours.
Anthony Burgess
#41. Never,' I said. 'One can die but once. Dim died before he was born. That red red krovvy will soon stop.
Anthony Burgess
#42. To turn a decent young man into a piece of clockwork should not, surely, be seen as any triumph for any government, save one that boasts of its repressiveness.
Anthony Burgess
#43. How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.
Anthony Burgess
#44. Regional dialects have to become national tongues before they can attain lasting glory. As with America, as with Australia. Scottish is different because Scotland considers itself to be a nation. Its language deserves a chapter to itself.
Anthony Burgess
#45. As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.
Anthony Burgess
#47. You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads to another. Right right right.
Anthony Burgess
#48. Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.
Anthony Burgess
#49. Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God's. The sixth day is for football
Anthony Burgess
#50. Because I'm too drunk to feel the pain if you hit me, and if you kill me I'll be glad to be dead.
Anthony Burgess
#51. Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
Anthony Burgess
#52. It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
Anthony Burgess
#53. 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
#55. That's the law, son. But you were never much of a one for following the law.
Anthony Burgess
#57. A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
Anthony Burgess
#58. Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
Anthony Burgess
#59. 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.
Anthony Burgess
#60. Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed.
Anthony Burgess
#61. Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones ... you are invited!
Anthony Burgess
#62. 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.
Anthony Burgess
#63. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
Anthony Burgess
#64. 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.
Anthony Burgess
#65. If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
Anthony Burgess
#66. We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
Anthony Burgess
#67. He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
Anthony Burgess
#68. Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
Anthony Burgess
#69. 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
#71. The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
Anthony Burgess
#72. I wanted music very bad this evening, that singing devotchka in the Korova having perhaps started me off. I wanted like a big feast of it before getting my passport stamped, my brothers, at sleep's frontier and the stripy shest lifted to let me through.
Anthony Burgess
#73. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea.
Anthony Burgess
#74. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.
Anthony Burgess
#75. You'd lay there after you'd drunk the old moloko and then you got the messel that everything all around you was sort of in the past.
Anthony Burgess
#77. Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
Anthony Burgess
#78. I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
Anthony Burgess
#79. I said, smiling very wide and droogie: 'Well, if it isn't fat stinking billygoat Billyboy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou.' And then we started.
Anthony Burgess
#80. With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Anthony Burgess
#81. Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
Anthony Burgess
#82. You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen.
Anthony Burgess
#83. Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
Anthony Burgess
#84. Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
Anthony Burgess
#85. Our subject is, you see, impelled towards the good by, paradoxically, being impelled towards evil. The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress. To counter these the subject has to switch to a diametrically opposed attitude.
Anthony Burgess
#86. But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.
Anthony Burgess
#87. 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
#89. Minister: As I was saying, Alex, you can be instrumental in changing the public verdict. Do you understand, Alex? Have I made myself clear?
Alex: As an unmuddied lake, Fred. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer. You can rely on me, Fred.
Anthony Burgess
#90. The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cured.
Anthony Burgess
#91. Odorous as a crateful of bad eggs with the miasma of original sin.
Anthony Burgess
#92. Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.
Anthony Burgess
#94. The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change.
"A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986
Anthony Burgess
#95. If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
Anthony Burgess
#96. We were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.
Anthony Burgess
#97. We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
Anthony Burgess
#98. I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless ...
Anthony Burgess
#99. 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.
Anthony Burgess
#100. The essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess
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