Anthony Burgess Life Quotes & Sayings

I am instructed by the Home Secretary to read out the following. . . . It is a prayer devised by the Ministry of Propaganda. . . . 'It is conceivable that the forces of death which at present are ravaging the esculent life of this planet have intelligence, in which case we beseech them to leave off. It we have done wrong--allowing in our blindness natural impulse to overcome reason--we are, of course, heartily sorry. But we submit that we have already suffered sufficiently for this wrong and we firmly resolve never to sin again. Amen. — Anthony Burgess

Go on, do me in, you bastard cowards, I don't want to live anyway, not in a stinking world like this one.' I told Dim to lay off a bit then, because it used to interest me sometimes to slooshy what some of these starry decreps had to say about life and the world. I said: 'Oh. And what's stinking about it? — Anthony Burgess

Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don't have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy. — Ayn Rand

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. — Anthony Burgess

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

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

Sonnet IV"

I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear.
No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell
Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;
And I have loved you all too long and well
To carry still the high sweet breast of spring.

Wherefore I say: O love, as summer goes,
I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
That you may hail anew the bird and rose
When I come back to you, as summer comes.
Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
Even your summer in another clime. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

But poor old Dim kept looking up at the stars and planets and the Luna with his rot wide open like a kid who'd never viddied any such thing before, and he said: "What's on them, I wonder. What would be up there on things like that?" I nudged him hard, saying: "Come, gloopy bastard as thou art. Think thou not on them. There'll be life like down here most likely, with some getting knifed and others doing the knifing. — Anthony Burgess

[Michael Bitbol] asked us to ponder whether the purpose of science is to provide answers about what things are in themselves, or if science is only our most advanced way of developing a pragmatic, conventional knowledge of phenomena sufficient to guide us in our actions. — Pier Luigi Luisi

I'll tell you a thing that will shock you. It will certainly shock the readers of Writer's Digest. What I often do nowadays when I have to, say, describe a room, is to take a page of a dictionary, any page at all, and see if with the words suggested by that one page in the dictionary I can build up a room, build up a scene. ... I even did it in a novel I wrote called MF. There's a description of a hotel vestibule whose properties are derived from Page 167 in R.J. Wilkinson's Malay-English Dictionary. Nobody has noticed. ... As most things in life are arbitrary anyway, you're not doing anything naughty, you're really normally doing what nature does, you're just making an entity out of the elements. I do recommend it to young writers. — 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

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

Have you noticed, Stil, how beautiful the young women are this year? — Frank Herbert

The overwhelming bulk of the cosmos is deathly quiet. But here and there - on worlds where matter is thick and conditions are right - noises are commonplace. And in some cases, these noisy worlds may ring with the sounds of life - the bleats and bellows of creatures we have never seen, but may someday discover. — Seth Shostak

Positive thoughts, positive self-image. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice. — Anthony Burgess

It's easy to forget people are blood and bone. They're not indestructible. — Alexandra Adornetto

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

The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish. — Anthony Burgess

The writer's life seethes within but not without. — Anthony Burgess

Well, if they would not go to school they must still have their education. And education they had had. — Anthony Burgess

On the other hand, he was also enjoying the ecstasy of an idea, not daring just yet to envision its complications, dangers, and vicious absurdities. For now, the idea was enough. It was indestructible. Transforming it into reality, well, that was something else altogether. For now, though, let's let him enjoy it. — Markus Zusak

Goodbye, goodbye, may Bog forgive you for a ruined life. Then I got on to the sill, the music blasting away to my left, and I shut my glazzies and felt the cold wind on my listo, then I jumped. — Anthony Burgess

In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations. — 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

Life to most of us is just a jumble of sensations, like a very bad film with no plot, no real beginning and end. — Anthony Burgess

Men like mystery. They don't want to be told everything woman are thinking. — Elisabeth Elliot

In other words, I heard life going on, and it was a comfort. — Anthony Burgess

God has positioned me just this way to be just like I am, to say what I say how I say it. — Steve Harvey

Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Where I see the infamy I seek to erase it. Party names mean nothing. The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded-. — Anthony Burgess

Re-imaging the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different path for unleashing business potential needs to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form. — Pearl Zhu

Rick Eldridge over at Reelworks Studios has the same vision that I have. They want to make good family quality product with a redemptive message underneath to allow people to open their hearts and minds. That (mindset) really drew me to The Ultimate Life ... Their vision and what they want to do very similar to me and Erin. — Drew Waters

Life is, of course, terrible. — Anthony Burgess

There are also some moving sections about World War II in Anthony Burgess's Any Old Iron, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Kit Reed's At War As Children, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, and Nancy Willard's Things Invisible to See. — Nancy Pearl

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

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

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. — Anthony Burgess

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