Anthony Burgess Quotes

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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.

~ Anthony Burgess

By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. 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 or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. 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. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ 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

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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.

~ Anthony Burgess

It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ 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

It may not be nice to be good, 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. 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

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...

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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.

~ 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

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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.

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ Anthony Burgess

Of course it was horrible,' smiled Dr. Branom. 'Violence is a very horrible thing. That's what you're learning now. Your body is learning it.

~ 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

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

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

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

~ Anthony Burgess

I was always on my oddy knocky.

~ Anthony Burgess

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.

~ Anthony Burgess

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- A Clockwork Orange Resucked intro to first full American version 1986

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ 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

Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

~ 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.

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ 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

To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

~ Anthony Burgess

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

~ Anthony Burgess