Anthony Burgess Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

When the State withers, humanity flowers.

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

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

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

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.

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch.

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

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.

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.

He said it was artificial respiration but now I find I'm to have his child.

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.

All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.

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.

Every dogma has its day.

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

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

I must say that acting was good training for the political life that lay ahead of us.

Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.