Top 168 Quotes & Sayings by Anthony Burgess

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in.

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

I didn't think; I experimented.

It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.

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

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

Every dogma has its day.

If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.

I'm a natural clown, I suppose, in writing, and one has to accept that; I can't do anything about it. I have written one or two novels which are not specifically funny. I wrote a study of Shakespeare which was not intended to be funny, but some people regard it as such.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.

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

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

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

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

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

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

But what I do I do because I like to do.

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

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

I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.

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

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

... A CLOCKWORK ORANGE- and I said: 'That's a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?' Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high type preaching goloss: '- The attempt to impose upon a man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen-

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

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

If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.

When the State withers, humanity flowers.

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

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

The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.

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.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

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.

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.

Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.

Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.

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

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

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

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

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

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

But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold.

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

Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.

Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.

Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.

Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.

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