Top 100 Burgess Quotes
#1. Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
Christopher Hitchens
#2. All literature, or most literature, is about sex. (A. Burgess)
Blanche Bachelar
#3. Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify some of them beyond the few centimeters of their actual size, and you are on the set of a science-fiction film ...
Stephen Jay Gould
#4. Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time?
Thomas C. Foster
#5. The great thing about Burgess's work is the dichotomy of making the hero or anti-hero an immoral man. And that's what makes it interesting. Because, you know, you are sucked into kind of like this guy.
Malcolm McDowell
#6. People, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Bob Burgess, after the tall man with the tasseled scarf turned down a side
Elizabeth Strout
#7. There are also some moving sections about World War II in Anthony Burgess's Any Old Iron, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Kit Reed's At War As Children, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, and Nancy Willard's Things Invisible to See.
Nancy Pearl
#8. IRIS MURDOCH ONLY WROTE one novel in her lifetime. But she wrote it twenty-six times. Anthony Burgess never wrote the same book twice. And he wrote about a thousand.
Thomas C. Foster
#9. Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
Stephen Jay Gould
#10. Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it.
Clive James
#11. BURGESS
How do you like Moscow?
CORAL
Loathe it, darling. I cannot understand what those Three Sisters were on about. It gives the play a very sinister slant.
Alan Bennett
#12. The Burgess Shale is not unique, but for those who study evolution and fossils it has become something of an icon. It provides a reference point and a benchmark, a point of common discussion and an issue of universal scientific interest.
Simon Conway Morris
#13. He sees our lineal success as a fortunate fluke: "Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay." Gould
Bill Bryson
#14. Kathy Burgess describes [Hillary] Clinton as fun and an all-around great person but admits it doesn't come through well.
Tamara Keith
#15. The snow-white angel alone remains, hovering over Tara Burgess's fresh grave, holding a single black rose in one hand. She does not move, does not even bat an eyelash. Her powdered face stays frozen in sorrow. The increasing rain pulls stray feathers from her wings and pins them to the mud below.
Erin Morgenstern
#16. The Burgess sisters arrived together. Tara and Lainie do a little bit of everything. Sometimes dancers, sometimes actresses. Once they were librarians, but that is a subject they will only discuss if heavily intoxicated.
Erin Morgenstern
#17. I said on the phone to my mother, "I think I'm going to write the story of the Burgess kids." "It's a good one," she agreed. "People will say it's not nice to write about people I know." My mother was tired that night. She yawned. "Well, you don't know them," she said. "Nobody ever knows anyone.
Elizabeth Strout
#18. Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special.
Carl Hiaasen
#19. Count no matron happy until she hath passed thirty, and hath not waxed fat.
Gelett Burgess
#20. There is a heavy price to pay for writing a bad book.
Tony Burgess
#22. One man has enthusiasm for 30 minutes, another for 30 days, but it is the man who has it for 30 years who makes a success of his life.
Edward Burgess Butler
#24. Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.
Anthony Burgess
#25. In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.
Anthony Burgess
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons; pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce; trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.
Anthony Burgess
#29. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
Anthony Burgess
#31. I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.
Anthony Burgess
#33. Nuclear power is here to stay, and we need to support a strong domestic uranium industry.
Michael Burgess
#34. I believe that States should be credited for their non-Federal investment in revenue-generating transportation facilities to address their regional transportation needs.
Michael Burgess
#36. The only thing that isn't free is you. You do as you're told. You sit in your seat until they say 'Stand'. You stay put til they say 'Go'. Maybe that's the way you like it. It's easy. It's all there. You don't have to think about. You don't even have to feel it.
Melvin Burgess
#37. 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
#38. Being a teenager is as difficult as living with one. And we've all been there. Perhaps that's the reason we're so hard on them.
Melvin Burgess
#39. Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
Anthony Burgess
#40. Without bigots, eccentrics, cranks and heretics the world would not progress.
Gelett Burgess
#41. It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
Anthony Burgess
#42. He'd come back, all open and helpless, and I suppose that's what won her around in the end. But it was so sad, because it was being himself that he found so difficult to cope with.
Melvin Burgess
#43. Roxy Music, Roxy Music Bengans, Stockholm Recommended by Kevin Rowland Royal
Tim Burgess
#44. We kissed, and sparks went off in my chest. At the end of the night he said, 'I know what you're thinking. You're wondering if I'll call tomorrow. I'll do better than that.' He called me the minute I got home and we talked till I fell asleep. I was smitten.
Gemma Burgess
#45. The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Anthony Burgess
#46. Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.
Anthony Burgess
#47. Sorry. Did you know you giggle in your sleep, by the way?'
'Really? How adorable of me.
Gemma Burgess
#48. I pinch myself every night when I hear the overture starting. I'm so overwhelmed by the whole process, and humbled and giddy all at the same time because I can't believe it's me that gets to sing these songs every night.
Tituss Burgess
#49. Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
Anthony Burgess
#51. All the rules had to be invented from the beginning. No one knew what the rules were, but gradually figured them out. The basics were: We've got to take a line. We've got to stay up off the floor. We have to have enough light to see. And we have to save enough air to get out.
Robert F. Burgess
#52. Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Anthony Burgess
#53. They use the M as an anchor to get the doughnut and then there's an escalator to nowhere.
Gemma Burgess
#54. My kids have become wonderful dancers themselves and enjoy teaching just as much as I do.
Bobby Burgess
#55. I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.
Anthony Burgess
#56. As a kid, I couldn't articulate it but I sought out things that could. At first it was horror films - extreme panic and terror, grotesque and maniacal. These films calmed me and made me feel more connected in my experiences.
Tony Burgess
#57. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.
Anthony Burgess
#58. A woman findeth in her last lover much of her first love; but a man seeth his next-to-the-last love, alway.
Gelett Burgess
#59. Funny how men call it being free and women call it being alone, isn't it?
Gemma Burgess
#60. Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil.
Anthony Burgess
#61. Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess
#63. I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.
Anthony Burgess
#65. My mama always said, You can always ask. The worst they can do is say no. But I don't think Mama was thinking about revenge and murder when she dealt out that piece of homespun advice
Catrina Burgess
#66. Men like to pursue an elusive woman like a cake of wet soap - even men who hate baths.
Gelett Burgess
#68. Oh bliss, bliss and heaven... Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh... And then, a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now... I knew such lovely pictures - Alex
Anthony Burgess
#69. The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
Anthony Burgess
#70. It wasn't a love story." -Tar's dad
It was a love story. Me, Gemma, and junk." -Tar
Melvin Burgess
#71. The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.
Anthony Burgess
#72. Suzanne: I'd rather be single than in an unfulfilling relationship.
Gemma Burgess
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. I wish Howard Ashman was still alive so I could just meet him and tell him his words are magic. It's so fun to say. He has such great alliteration and paints the most vivid images with his lyrics
Tituss Burgess
#76. I kept pushing the old noga through the floorboards near, and the Durango 95 ate up the road like spaghetti.
Anthony Burgess
#78. A reproof entereth more into a woman of sense than an hundred compliments into a fool.
Gelett Burgess
#80. The French have the perfect word for it: 'flaneur'. It means to stroll around aimlessly but enjoyably, observing life and your surroundings. Baudelaire defined a flaneur as 'a person who walks the city in order to experience it'.
Gemma Burgess
#82. 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
#83. It's funny how the colours of the like real world only seem real real when you viddy them on a screen
Anthony Burgess
#85. The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.
Anthony Burgess
#86. People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.
Anthony Burgess
#88. 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.
Anthony Burgess
#89. Oh, I'm dying,' I like moaned. 'Oh, I have a ghastly pain in my side. Appendicitis, it is. Ooooooh.' 'Appendy shitehouse,' grumbled this veck.
Anthony Burgess
#90. 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
#91. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets threewise silverflamed,
Anthony Burgess
#92. Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.
Anthony Burgess
#93. There comes a time, however, when violence is seen as juvenile and boring. It is the repartee of the stupid and ignorant.
Anthony Burgess
#94. I disappear from the public eye and get rediscovered quite often.
Burgess Meredith
#96. He was gorgeous. Every feature on his face perfect, dark and inviting. The boy could be his own photo shoot. Kasey Reese - Men of the Cave
Marisette Burgess
#98. 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
#99. This must be a real horrorshow film if you're so keen on my viddying it.
Anthony Burgess
#100. I've been in New York for going on five years now, and I always thought I would make a mark and do something but I never thought it would be this big of a deal. I'm so blessed and I'm truly honored.
Tituss Burgess
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