Burgess Quotes & Sayings

As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse. — Anthony Burgess

Happiness is not always the answer let the other emotions out is sometimes what is needed — Michael Burgess

Here's what I think ... There is no unfucked up. People think there is, but there's not. We're all fucked up in different ways. It's simply a question of making your fuck-ups work for you.-Aidan — Gemma Burgess

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. — 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

I think art is sublimated libido. You can't be a eunuch priest, and you can't be a eunuch artist. — Anthony Burgess

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

Horrorshow is right, friend. A real show of horrors. — Anthony Burgess

Men like to pursue an elusive woman like a cake of wet soap - even men who hate baths. — Gelett Burgess

I wish Howard Ashman was still alive so I could just meet him and tell him his words are magic. It's so fun to say. He has such great alliteration and paints the most vivid images with his lyrics — Tituss Burgess

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

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs — 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

Have you by chance brought some real British tea? Twining's? Or from Jackson's in Piccadilly? — Anthony Burgess

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

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it. — Anthony Burgess

Minister: As I was saying, Alex, you can be instrumental in changing the public verdict. Do you understand, Alex? Have I made myself clear?
Alex: As an unmuddied lake, Fred. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer. You can rely on me, Fred. — Anthony Burgess

What's in a name? Sometimes a lot of real work. — Thornton W. Burgess

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

Nuclear power will help provide the electricity that our growing economy needs without increasing emissions. This is truly an environmentally responsible source of energy. — Michael Burgess

As a Republican, I am all for competition. — Michael Burgess

When Medicare was first enacted in 1965, it provided coverage for hospitalization, doctor visits and surgeries, but there was no coverage for prescription medications. — Michael Burgess

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

Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned. — 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

Most women have all other women as adversaries; most men have all other men as their allies. — Gelett Burgess

An Underground that knew all about this, knew all about Les, was preparing to wake up the world and invite it to a Canada's Wonderland made of bodies. Giant bloodslides. Houses of torture where children's kidneys are twisted like sponges in the fat hands of musclemen. There would be buns crammed with the cooked knuckles of teenagers, and a king, sitting on a mountain of kings, eating his own shoulder. — Tony Burgess

If I told you that everything about you had been just made up by someone, that all of your thoughts, all of your memories, even the things you chose to say had been invented and that they weren't real, that you weren't real, would you believe me? I don't think so. — Tony Burgess

The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonderful - yet so real - as *Opabinia*? — Stephen Jay Gould

She didn't have to be offered anything; it was already hers. She was more herself than anyone else ever was and as soon as I clapped eyes on her I knew I wanted to be myself just as much as she was herself. — Melvin Burgess

I seek out songs that I believe in. You have to believe it in your heart first. Then the listener will believe it. — Sonny Burgess

He'd come back, all open and helpless, and I suppose that's what won her around in the end. But it was so sad, because it was being himself that he found so difficult to cope with. — Melvin Burgess

We saw in 2003 the beginnings of an outbreak of an illness called SARS. SARS ended up killing 800 people which is a significant number of deaths, but nowhere near as high as it could have been. — Michael Burgess

Because I'm too drunk to feel the pain if you hit me, and if you kill me I'll be glad to be dead. — Anthony Burgess

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

I've done everything. All of it. You think it, I've done it. All the things you never dared, all the things you dream about, all the things you were curious about and then forgot because you knew you never would. I did 'em, I did 'em yesterday while you were still in bed.
What about you? When's it gonna be your turn? — Melvin Burgess

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

There is indeed no such thing in life as absolute darkness; one's eyes revolt and hasten to fill the vacuum by floating in sparks, dream patterns, figures whimsical and figures grotesque, shifting and clad in complementary colors, to appease the indignant cups and rods of the retina. — Gelett Burgess

Regional dialects have to become national tongues before they can attain lasting glory. As with America, as with Australia. Scottish is different because Scotland considers itself to be a nation. Its language deserves a chapter to itself. — Anthony Burgess

There were fat cats and skinny cats. The long-tailed and the bobbed. The daring young leapers, and the old windowsill sleepers. Balls of waddling fluff, smooth-coated prowlers, and hairless ones that looked fragile and wise. The tiger-striped, the ring-tailed, and the ones with matching coloured socks and mittens. There were tabbies and calicos. Manx and Persians. Siamese and Bombay. Ragdolls and Birmans. Maine Coons and Russian Blues. There were Snowshoes and Somalis, Tonkinese and Turkish, and many, many more. Brown and beige and orange and grey and black and white and silver cats, each with gleaming eyes of emerald, or sapphire, or amber. A rainbow of precious stones. — Brooke Burgess

When things are good, it is because we remember a time when they were not. When there was pain. But now the pain is gone, so things are 'good'. When we hurt, it is because we recall a time when we did not. When there was no pain. But now we suffer, so things are 'bad'. The tiger sipped from the cup, peering at the boy over the rim. Stars swirled in its eyes. "Good. Bad. The cup holds both. — Brooke Burgess

When we pray we admit defeat. — Anthony Burgess

The French have the perfect word for it: 'flaneur'. It means to stroll around aimlessly but enjoyably, observing life and your surroundings. Baudelaire defined a flaneur as 'a person who walks the city in order to experience it'. — Gemma Burgess

As the dog becomes thoroughbred in the laws of clan and caste; obedient, fraternal and loyal; so is the man who accepts the gentleman's code. — Gelett Burgess

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

BURGESS
How do you like Moscow?

CORAL
Loathe it, darling. I cannot understand what those Three Sisters were on about. It gives the play a very sinister slant. — Alan Bennett

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

The only things I like are either illegal or they make me fat. — Bobby Burgess

Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it. — Clive James

When we come to describe musical instruments we should treat them as the artworks of outstanding, intelligent craftsmen who have brought them into being by manual labor and intellectual effort. By applying precise plans to suitable materials they have skillfully fashioned instruments that publish the glory of God, or (which is perfectly legitimate) give pleasure to mankind with their sweet harmonious sounds. - Michael Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum (1619) — Geoffrey Burgess

The temptation to vivify the tale and make it walk abroad on its own legs is hard to deny. — Gelett Burgess

Life is, of course, terrible. — Anthony Burgess

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

Ultimately, we don't want to develop techniques to win behavior management battles, we want to develop techniques that allow us to avoid the battles altogether. — Dave Burgess

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

I wrapped my arms around my body, pushing away my doubts and indecision for just a moment, and looked out toward the cemetery. "Whatever it takes," I vowed. And as I said the words, I felt a chill run across my neck and a ghostly touch slide down my cheek — Catrina Burgess

Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify some of them beyond the few centimeters of their actual size, and you are on the set of a science-fiction film ... — Stephen Jay Gould

If I had died it would have been even better for you political bratchnies, would it not, pretending and treacherous droogs as you are.' But all that came out was er er er. — 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

Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language — Anthony Burgess

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book ... I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist. — Anthony Burgess

Your chest is surprisingly hairy.'
'I hope I can't say the same thing about you. — Gemma Burgess

Physicists say we are made of stardust. Intergalactic debris and far-flung atoms, shards of carbon nanomatter rounded up by gravity to circle the sun. As atoms pass through an eternal revolving door of possible form, energy and mass dance in fluid relationship. We are stardust, we are man, we are thought. We are story. — Glenda Burgess

Count no matron happy until she hath passed thirty, and hath not waxed fat. — Gelett Burgess

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

An eye for an eye, I say. If someone hits you you hit back, do you not? Why then should not the State, very severely hit by you brutal hooligans, not hit back also? But the new view is to say no. The new view is that we turn the bad into the good. All of which seems to me grossly unjust. — Anthony Burgess

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing. — Anthony Burgess

I said on the phone to my mother, "I think I'm going to write the story of the Burgess kids." "It's a good one," she agreed. "People will say it's not nice to write about people I know." My mother was tired that night. She yawned. "Well, you don't know them," she said. "Nobody ever knows anyone. — Elizabeth Strout

On January 1, 2006, Medicare will begin to offer a prescription drug benefit, and for the first time, it will place an emphasis on preventive care and early treatment of disease. — Michael 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

If anyone has the opportunity to work with that woman, jump at it. She is the most generous, most giving director I have ever worked with in my entire life. She is classy. She speaks a dozen difference languages. — Tituss Burgess

It is the belief in duty that captures her spirit best. Yet it is not duty in an arid or formal sense; she enjoyed life, lived it and loved it to the full. 'She loved her country and in turn it loved her.' The — Colin 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

It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen. — Anthony Burgess

A woman and a mouse, they carry a tale wherever they go. — Gelett Burgess

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

They don't go into what is the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop? If lewdies are good that's because they like it, and I wouldn't ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. And I was patronizing the other shop. More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But 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. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of the brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? — Anthony Burgess

Old friends, we say, are best, when some sudden disillusionment shakes our faith in a new comrade. — Gelett Burgess

But she no longer felt sadness about it, the pressure of sorrow that had overtaken her at the table, the longing for all the Burgess kids, and the sense of the irreplaceable familiarity of her old life-that had passed the way the cramping of a stomach muscle passes, and the absence of its pain was glorious. — Elizabeth Strout

Many people seek God in a way that is only palatable to their own desires. They want God to be who they want Him to be, not who He really is, and so they never find the real, true God. Many people find God's ways offensive, harsh, even arrogant. But when you seek God for who He truly is, you'll find that He is magnificent. — Sherri Burgess

When the State withers, humanity flowers. — Anthony Burgess

There is work that is work and there is play that is play; there is play that is work and work that is play. And in only one of these lies happiness. — Gelett Burgess

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

like candy thunder. Oh, — Anthony Burgess

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

I disappear from the public eye and get rediscovered quite often. — Burgess Meredith

It is in the blood of genius to love play for its own sake, and whether one uses one's skill on thrones or women, swords or pens, gold or fame, the game's the thing. — Gelett Burgess

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

Today, nuclear power provides 20 percent of power in the United States. — Michael Burgess

Coowie it's the happiest way of saying hello — Michael John 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

And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. 'You felt ill this afternoon,' he said, 'because you're getting better. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all. — Anthony Burgess

One thing I could never stand was to see a filthy dirty old drunky howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blurp blurp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts;I could never stand to see anyone like that. whatever his age might be, but more especially when he was real old like this one was. — Anthony Burgess

You must take your chance boy. The choice has been all yours. — 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

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

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