Anthony Burgess Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.

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

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?

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

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.

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... A CLOCKWORK ORANGE- and I said: 'That's a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?' Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high type preaching goloss: '- The attempt to impose upon a man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen-

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

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

When the State withers, humanity flowers.

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.

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.

It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.

Each man kills the thing he loves.

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

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

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

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?

The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.

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

Every dogma has its day.

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.

laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.

Hitler was a teetotalitarian.

Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.

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.

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

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

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.

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.

Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!

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

I didn't think; I experimented.

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

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.

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.