Anthony Burgess Quotes

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

My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world...

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

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

The heresy of an age of reason. I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

Yes yes yes, there it was. Youth must go, ah yes. But 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

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.

I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.

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

Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.

Oh? And what's so stinking about it?.

Dreams go by opposites I was once told.

Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language

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.

Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.

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

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

You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God.

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.

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

The heresy of an age of reason,' or some such slovos [words]. 'I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

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

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

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

...I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless...

What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

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.

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

They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and were all bruised and pouty. Well, if they would not go to school they must have there education. And education they had had.

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.

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

What's all this about sin, eh?''That,' I said, very sick. 'Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.' And then I was really sick and they had to bring a bowl that was in the shape of like a kidney.'Music,' said Dr. Brodsky, like musing. 'So you're keen on music. I know nothing about it myself. It's a useful emotional heightener, that's all I know. Well, well. What do you think about that, eh, Branom?''It can't be helped,' said Dr. Branom. 'Each man kills the thing he loves...

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

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

Well, everything's a lesson, isn't it? Learning all the time, as you could say.

The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cured.

When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea.

A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.

You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads to another. Right right right.

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

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.

I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother.

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

You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.

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

The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress.

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.

And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.

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.

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

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.

What sort of world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there's not no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more.

The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penelogical theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens, You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.

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.

The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.