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Anthony Burgess Quotes

English author, Birth: 25-2-1917, Death: 22-11-1993 Anthony Burgess Quotes
1.
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
Anthony Burgess

2.
We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
Anthony Burgess

3.
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

4.
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.
Anthony Burgess

5.
...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
Anthony Burgess

Similar Authors: Rush Limbaugh Cassandra Clare Charles Spurgeon Deepak Chopra Stephen King George Bernard Shaw Winston Churchill Neil Gaiman Richelle Mead Jodi Picoult Francois de La Rochefoucauld Marianne Williamson Wayne Dyer Michel de Montaigne Victor Hugo
6.
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.
Anthony Burgess

7.
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
Anthony Burgess

8.
I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.
Anthony Burgess

Quote Topics by Anthony Burgess: Writing Men Art Book Brother Orange Real Life World Thinking Evil Fiction Literature Sex Choices Life Is Doe Children Lovely Boys Wine Clockwork Littles Memories Violence Two Character Believe Mean Modern
9.
Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
Anthony Burgess

10.
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

11.
Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
Anthony Burgess

12.
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

13.
The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
Anthony Burgess

14.
When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess

15.
Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
Anthony Burgess

16.
Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
Anthony Burgess

17.
He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
Anthony Burgess

18.
It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
Anthony Burgess

19.
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
Anthony Burgess

20.
The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
Anthony Burgess

21.
... 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-
Anthony Burgess

22.
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
Anthony Burgess

23.
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
Anthony Burgess

24.
When the State withers, humanity flowers.
Anthony Burgess

25.
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

26.
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.
Anthony Burgess

27.
It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.
Anthony Burgess

28.
Each man kills the thing he loves.
Anthony Burgess

29.
Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
Anthony Burgess

30.
Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Anthony Burgess

31.
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
Anthony Burgess

32.
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

33.
The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
Anthony Burgess

34.
If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
Anthony Burgess

35.
Every dogma has its day.
Anthony Burgess

36.
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.
Anthony Burgess

37.
laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
Anthony Burgess

38.
Hitler was a teetotalitarian.
Anthony Burgess

39.
Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.
Anthony Burgess

40.
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

41.
Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
Anthony Burgess

42.
Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.
Anthony Burgess

43.
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

44.
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.
Anthony Burgess

45.
Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
Anthony Burgess

46.
Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.
Anthony Burgess

47.
I didn't think; I experimented.
Anthony Burgess

48.
Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
Anthony Burgess

49.
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.
Anthony Burgess

50.
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.
Anthony Burgess