Anthony Burgess Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Anthony Burgess on Wise Famous Quotes.
Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God's. The sixth day is for football
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.
And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good.
I kept pushing the old noga through the floorboards near, and the Durango 95 ate up the road like spaghetti.
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although ... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.
And so I hunger for something that is permanent, something that will last forever. Truth, I am told, is a thing that will last forever.
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.
The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets threewise silverflamed,
We were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.
As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.
With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.
A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.
I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.
Of course it was horrible,' smiled Dr. Branom. 'Violence is a very horrible thing. That's what you're learning now. Your body is learning it.
It's funny how the colours of the like real world only seem real real when you viddy them on a screen
Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.
Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
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.
But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.
Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.
Well, if they would not go to school they must still have their education. And education they had had.
What gives, O my little sister? Come thou and have a nice lay-down with your malenky droog in this bed.
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.
As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.
The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.
You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.
Never,' I said. 'One can die but once. Dim died before he was born. That red red krovvy will soon stop.
A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life.
Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
Life to most of us is just a jumble of sensations, like a very bad film with no plot, no real beginning and end.
It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.
I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.