Anthony Burgess Quotes

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ Anthony Burgess

People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.

~ Anthony Burgess

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.

~ 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

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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.

~ Anthony Burgess

The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance. You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours.

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ 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 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?

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ 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

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

~ Anthony Burgess

Dreams go by opposites I was once told.

~ Anthony Burgess

The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.

~ 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

Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.

~ 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

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

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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.

~ 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

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...

~ 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

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.

~ 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 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.

~ Anthony Burgess

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.

~ Anthony Burgess

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

~ 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

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

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

~ Anthony Burgess

Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ Anthony Burgess