Anthony Burgess Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The downtrodden who are the great creators of slang hurl pithiness and colour at poverty and oppression.

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.

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.

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...

Dreams go by opposites I was once told.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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