Anthony Burgess Quotes

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.

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.

The writer's life seethes within but not without.

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.

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

I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.

All novels are experimental.

I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

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.

Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.

Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.

...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.

What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.

With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.

Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.

All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.

Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance.

Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.

For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.

I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.

You have no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It's like having a totally efficient contraceptive.

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.

I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.

But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.

Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.

Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.

A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's supposed to be doing.

Civilised my syphilised yarbles.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.

I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.

I was always on my oddy knocky.

I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.

As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.