Anthony Burgess Quotes & Sayings

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. — Anthony Burgess

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

The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets threewise silverflamed, — Anthony Burgess

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

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. — Anthony Burgess

What's this for?' I said. And this veck replied, interrupting his like song an instant, that it was to keep my gulliver still and make me look at the screen. 'But,' I said, 'I want to look at the screen. I've been brought here to viddy films and viddy films I shall. — Anthony Burgess

You'd lay there after you'd drunk the old moloko and then you got the messel that everything all around you was sort of in the past. — Anthony Burgess

Well, well, well, well. If it isn't fat, stinking billygoat Billy-Boy in poison. How art thou, thy globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou. — Anthony Burgess

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

Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts. — Anthony Burgess

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much. — Anthony Burgess

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. — Anthony Burgess

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

The thrill of theft, of violence, the urge to live easy - is it worth it when we have undeniable proof, yes, yes, incontrovertible evidence that hell exists? — Anthony Burgess

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs — Anthony Burgess

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

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

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

What's it going to be then, eh? — Anthony Burgess

It's funny how the colours of the like real world only seem real real when you viddy them on a screen — Anthony Burgess

But what I do I do because I like to do. — Anthony Burgess

But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the CAUSE of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of GOODNESS, so why of the other shop? — Anthony Burgess

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. — Anthony Burgess

The twenty-first chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. 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. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. — Anthony Burgess

But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there ... And all that cal. — Anthony Burgess

A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive. — Anthony Burgess

That's the law, son. But you were never much of a one for following the law. — Anthony Burgess

Everything ends
In Mexico Mexico,
An excellent place to die.
Come some day and try
Mexico. — Anthony Burgess

Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines. — Anthony Burgess

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. — Anthony Burgess

I kept pushing the old noga through the floorboards near, and the Durango 95 ate up the road like spaghetti. — Anthony Burgess

So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing. — Anthony Burgess

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

The next morning I woke up at oh eight oh oh hours, my brothers, and as I still felt shagged and fagged and fashed and bashed and my glazzies were stuck together real horrorshow with sleepglue, I thought I would not go to school. — Anthony Burgess

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. — Anthony Burgess

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

Let us have evil prancing on the page and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the inherited beliefs, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Holy Roller, about people being able to make themselves better. Such a book would be sensational, and so it is. But I do not think it is a fair picture of human life. I — Anthony Burgess

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

I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning. — Anthony Burgess

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

Shined, combed, brushed and gorgeous — Anthony Burgess

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

I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop. — Anthony Burgess

Violence makes violence — Anthony Burgess

Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up. — Anthony Burgess

But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, then the governing machine grows remote, impersonal, even inhuman. It takes money from us for purposes we do not seem to sanction; it treats us as abstract statistics; it controls an army; it supports a police force whose function does not always appear to be protective. — Anthony Burgess

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

You were not put on this Earth just to get in touch with god — Anthony Burgess

You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured! I was cured alright. — Anthony Burgess

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

Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers. — Anthony Burgess

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

Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil. — Anthony Burgess

And then, before he told me, I knew what it was. The old ptitsa who had
all the kots and koshkas had passed on to a better world in one of the city
hospitals. I'd cracked her a bit too hard, like. Well, well, that was
everything. I thought of all those kots and koshkas mewling for moloko and
getting none, not any more from their starry forella of a mistress. That was
everything. I'd done the lot, now and me still only fifteen. — Anthony Burgess

Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness. — Anthony Burgess

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art. — Anthony Burgess

There was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the way I could see it. — Anthony Burgess

And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. — Anthony Burgess

There is the devastatingly simple, yet profound, moral dilemma, which underlies the book: is it better for a man to choose to be bad than to be conditioned to be good? — Anthony Burgess

Now in those days, my brothers, the teaming up was mostly by fours and fives, these being like auto-teams, for being a comfy number for an auto, and six being the outside limit for gang-size. Sometimes gangs would gang up so as to make like malenky armies for big nightwar, but mostly it was best to roam in these like small numbers. — Anthony Burgess

Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God's. The sixth day is for football — Anthony Burgess

How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now. — Anthony Burgess

And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get the hit than give it. If that veck had stayed I might even have like presented the other cheek. — Anthony Burgess

We were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure. — Anthony Burgess

English is a curiously expressive language. Womb, room, tomb. It sums up living in three words. — Anthony Burgess

When we pray we admit defeat. — Anthony Burgess

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

Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination. — Anthony Burgess

But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold. — Anthony Burgess

When the State withers, humanity flowers. — Anthony Burgess

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

At the age of fifteen he had bought off a twopenny stall in the market a duo-decimo book of recipes, gossip, and homilies, printed in 1605. His stepmother, able to read figures, had screamed at the sight of it when he had proudly brought it home. 1605 was 'the olden days', meaning Henry VIII, the executioner's axe, and the Great Plague. She thrust the book into the kitchen fire with the tongs, yelling that it must be seething with lethal germs. A limited, though live, sense of history. And history was the reason why she would never go to London. She saw it as dominated by the Bloody Tower, Fleet Street full of demon barbers, as well as dangerous escalators everywhere. — Anthony Burgess

You're a romantic," said Crabbe. "You expect too much. Reality's always dull, you know, but when we see that it's all there is, well-it miraculously ceases to be dull. — Anthony Burgess

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

You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly - that business about marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain. — Anthony Burgess

This truth may be handled either sinfully or profitably; sinfully as when it is treated on only to satisfy curiosity, and to keep up a mere barren speculative dispute ... This point of election ... is not to be agitated in a verbal and contentious way, but in a saving way, to make us tremble and to set us upon a more diligent and close striving with God in prayer, and all other duties. — Anthony Burgess

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

The entrant mooed like a calf but in insolence looked about him. Hew saw Kit. Kit saw him. Nay, it was more than pure seeing. It was Jove's bolt. It was, to borrow from the papists, the bell of the consecration. It was the revelation of the possibility nay the certainty of the probability or somewhat of the kind of the. It was the sharp knife of a sort of truth in the disguise of danger. Both went out together, and it was as if they were entering, rather than leaving, the corridor outside with its sour and burly servant languidly asweep with his broom, the major-domo in livery hovering, transformed to a sweet bower of assignation, though neither knew the other save in a covenant familiar through experience unrecorded and unrecordable whose terms were not of time and to which space was a child's puzzle. — Anthony Burgess

Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed. — Anthony Burgess

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

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

And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight. — Anthony Burgess

And I thought to myself, Hell and blast you all, if all you bastards are on the side of Good then I'm glad I belong to the other shop. — Anthony Burgess

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it. — Anthony Burgess

One can die but once. Dim died before he was born. — Anthony Burgess

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

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy. — Anthony Burgess

Our subject is, you see, impelled towards the good by, paradoxically, being impelled towards evil. The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress. To counter these the subject has to switch to a diametrically opposed attitude. — Anthony Burgess

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

I said, smiling very wide and droogie: 'Well, if it isn't fat stinking billygoat Billyboy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou.' And then we started. — Anthony Burgess

Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. — Anthony Burgess

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. — Anthony Burgess

Ah, 6655321, think on the divine suffering. Meditate on that, my boy.' And all the time he had this rich manny von of Scotch on him, and then he went off to his little cantora to peet some more. So I read all about the scourging and the crowning with thorns and then the cross veshch and all that cal, and I viddied better that there was something in it. While the stereo played bits of lovely Bach I closed my glazzies and viddied myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in, being dressed in a like toga that was the heighth of Roman fashion. So being in Staja 84F was not all that wasted, and the Governor himself was very pleased to hear that I had taken to like Religion, and that was where I had my hopes. — Anthony Burgess

There she was, welcoming him in, farting prrrrrrp like ten thousand earthquakes, belching arrrp and og like a million volcanoes, while the whole universe roared with approving laughter. She swung tits like sagging moons at him, drew from black teeth an endless snake of bacon-rind, pelted him with balls of ear-wax and snuffled green snot in his direction. The thrones roared and the powers were helpless. Enderby was suffocated by smells: sulphuretted hydrogren, unwashed armpits, halitosis, faeces, standing urine, putrefying meat - all thrust into his mouth and nostrils in squelchy balls. 'Help,' he tried to call. 'Help help help.' He fell, crawled, crying, 'Help, help.' The black, which was solid laughter and filth, closed on him. He gave one last scream before yielding to it. — Anthony Burgess

A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth. — Anthony Burgess

All novels are experimental. — Anthony Burgess

Dreams go by opposites I was once told. — Anthony Burgess

You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen. — Anthony Burgess

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. — Anthony Burgess

Civilised my syphilised yarbles. — Anthony Burgess