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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

When the State withers, humanity flowers.

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

Each man kills the thing he loves.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I didn't think; I experimented.

Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?

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

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.

The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

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.

But what I do I do because I like to do.

In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.