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Anthony Burgess Quotes

John Anthony Burgess Wilson, – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English writer and composer. From relatively modest beginnings in a Catholic family in Manchester, he eventually became one of the best known English literary figures of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Although Burgess was predominantly a comic writer, his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange remains his best known novel. In 1971 it was adapted into a highly controversial film by Stanley Kubrick, which Burgess said was chiefly responsible for the popularity of the book. Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers, regarded by most critics as his greatest novel. He wrote librettos and screenplays, including for the 1977 TV mini-series Jesus of Nazareth. He worked as a literary critic for several publications, including The Observer and The Guardian, and wrote studies of classic writers, notably James Joyce. A versatile linguist, Burgess lectured in phonetics, and translated Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus Rex and the opera Carmen, among others.

Burgess also composed over 250 musical works; he sometimes claimed to consider himself as much a composer as an author, although he enjoyed considerably more success in writing.

✵ 25. February 1917 – 22. November 1993
Anthony Burgess photo

Works

A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
The Wanting Seed
The Wanting Seed
Anthony Burgess
Earthly Powers
Earthly Powers
Anthony Burgess
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
The Wanting Seed
The Wanting Seed
Anthony Burgess
Earthly Powers
Earthly Powers
Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess: 297 quotes12 likes

Famous Anthony Burgess Quotes

Anthony Burgess quote: “What I do I do because I like to do.”

“What I do I do because I like to do.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Variant: But what I do I do because I like to do.
Source: A Clockwork Orange

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

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965)
Variant: Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

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

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess Quotes about the world

“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 [things] I had done…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

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

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

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“…the jeaned and rucksacked young I see on Continental trains or thumbing rides on motorways are not in search of the exotic. They are seeking confirmation that their own kind exists everywhere and denies the racial and cultural variety that used to be one of the joys of the world. If they want the exotic at all it is in the form of what they know well in their own lands through regular, though usually illegal, importation….”

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

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

Anthony Burgess

"The Ball is Free to Roll"
Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)
Source: Homage To Qwert Yuiop: Essays

Anthony Burgess: Trending quotes

“Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“But what happens when you die?' 'You’re finished with,' Enderby said promptly. 'Done for. And even if you weren’t – well, you die then, gasp your last, then you’re sort of wandering, free of body. You wander around and then you come in contact with a sort of big thing. What is this big thing? God, if you like.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End (1974)

Anthony Burgess Quotes

“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.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Variant: 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.
Source: A Clockwork Orange

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

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Variant: When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
Source: A Clockwork Orange

“What's it going to be then, eh?”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“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?”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“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.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“This must be a real horrorshow film if you're so keen on my viddying it.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“Civilised my syphilised yarbles.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“The next morning I woke up at oh eight oh oh hours, my brothers, and as I still felt shagged and fagged and fashed and bashed and my glazzies were stuck together real horrorshow with sleepglue, I thought I would not go to school.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“I was always on my oddy knocky.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

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

Anthony Burgess book The Wanting Seed

Source: The Wanting Seed

“I was cured all right.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

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

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Variant: To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
Source: A Clockwork Orange

“I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“Power power, everybody like wants power”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange
Variant: Power, power, everybody like wants power

“Is this really true? If we take an average day in the life of the average man we seem to see very little evidence of concern with the sciences and the arts. The average man gets up, goes to work, eats his meals, reads the newspapers, watches television, goes to the cinema, goes to bed, sleeps, wakes up, starts all over again. Unless we happen to be professional scientists, laboratory experiments and formulae have ceased to have any meaning for most of us; unless we happen to be poets or painters or musicians—or teachers of literature, painting, and music—the arts seem to us to be only the concern of schoolchildren. And yet people have said, and people still say, that the great glories of our civilisation are the scientists and artists. Ancient Greece is remembered because of mathematicians like Euclid and Pythagoras, because of poets like Homer and dramatists like Sophocles. In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.”

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

“It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original - with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.”

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

“And now," Herod calmly said, "You can kill all the new-born…. Kill them all…. take your men and let your men take their swords. Make sure they're sharp. To Bethlehem. Hack. Lunge. Chop. Kill.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Man of Nazareth (1979)

“Here we go again,’ he thought. ‘Drink and reminiscence. Another day of wasted time. They’re right when they say we drink too much out here. And we slobber too much over ourselves…. We’re all sorry for ourselves because we’re not big executives or artists or happily married men in a civilized temperate climate.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“If one does not wish to be dissatisfied with one’s lot at home, one ought to go where the flies and the stinks are, which means the Middle East. This is also a good way of reconciling oneself to one’s laws and police force and the probity of one’s magistrates. The really great British travellers, like Charles M. Doughty for instance, to say nothing of ‘Eothen’ Kinglake, always went East, but not too far East. When you get to Southeast Asia you find no dirt or flies but the suspicion that you are in a tropical paradise, and then you go to pieces. It is essential, when travelling, to feel that you belong to a superior civilization, and the lands of the Arabs lavishly grant opportunities to nourish this conviction….”

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

“It had, perhaps, not been a very edifying life. On the booze in England, in India, in Malaya… And then a couple of gins for breakfast and then the first beers of the day in a kedai … He had been driven out of that Eden…because of his sinful desire to taste what was forbidden.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“Her face was that of a boy gang-leader, smooth with the innocence of one who, by the same quirk as blinds a man to the mystery of whistling or riding a bicycle, has never mastered the art of affection or compassion or properly learned the moral dichotomy.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

“Everything off. I want to see you in your horrific potbellied hairy filthy nakedness.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End (1974)

“There was no real need…of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till’s guts.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“…he had to admit to a faint admiration (faint as angostura colouring gin and water)”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

“Easier, lad, with those soft small bodies…. Nothing to it. They're just soft squashy things.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Man of Nazareth (1979)

“How can slaves be sent by Allah? You all have hairless faces, the mark of the bondman.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

“You served here how long, Cornelius?’
‘Long enough to learn about what they believe. Not long enough to learn to speak their language well enough to get their confidence. Not long enough to learn how to read their books. Now I’ve three years before retirement and a measure of spare time for getting down to it.’
‘This, you know,’ Marcellus said, ‘is all wrong. You’re not here to get their confidence or read their books. They’re a colonized people. We’re here to give orders.
‘They’d rather die than obey some of the Roman orders. Besides, it’s laid down that their religion is inviolate…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)

“My darling one…. I shall be thinking of you while you are away and hope you will remember to wrap up warm when you go out at night.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“Evidently, there is a political element in the attack on The Satanic Verses which has killed and injured good if obstreperous Muslims in Islamabad, though it may be dangerously blasphemous to suggest it. The Ayatollah Khomeini is probably within his self-elected rights in calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, or of anyone else for that matter, on his own holy ground. To order outraged sons of the Prophet to kill him, and the directors of Penguin Books, on British soil is tantamount to a jihad. It is a declaration of war on citizens of a free country, and as such it is a political act. It has to be countered by an equally forthright, if less murderous, declaration of defiance…. I do not think that even our British Muslims will be eager to read that great vindication of free speech, which is John Milton’s Areopagitica. Oliver Cromwell’s Republic proposed muzzling the press, and Milton replied by saying, in effect, that the truth must declare itself by battling with falsehood in the dust and heat…. I gain the impression that few of the protesting Muslims in Britain know directly what they are protesting against. Their Imams have told them that Mr Rushdie has published a blasphemous book and must be punished. They respond with sheeplike docility and wolflike aggression. They forgot what Nazis did to books … they shame a free country by denying free expression through the vindictive agency of bonfires…. If they do not like secular society, they must fly to the arms of the Ayatollah or some other self-righteous guardian of strict Islamic morality.”

Anthony Burgess

'Islam's Gangster Tactics', in the London Independent newspaper , 1989
Writing

“The Christian ecumenical movement will have reached its limit, meaning that Catholicism will have turned into Protestantism and Protestantism into agnosticism…. But Islam will not have lost any of its rigour…. Supernature abhors a supervacuum. With the death of institutional Christianity will come the spread of Islam.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, 1985 (1978)

“Sir, we are trying to work because we are having to take the examination in a very brief time from now, but the younger boys are not realizing the importance of our labours and they are creating veritable pandemoniums while we are immersed in our studies. To us who are their lawful and appointed superiors they are giving overmuch insolence, nor are they sufficiently overawed by our frequent threatenings. I would be taking it, sir, as inestimable favour if you would deliver harsh words and verbal punishing to them all, sir, especially the Malay boys, who are severely lacking in due respectfulness and incorrigible to discipline also.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“…The senior Mr Denham’s,’ he said, with deadly Eastern realism, ‘will perhaps only be better in the grave.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“But you like her, don’t you?’ asked Howarth. ‘You like Mrs Connor?’ For himself, thought Howarth, he did not particularly like Mrs Connor. He desired Mrs Connor, however.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Worm and the Ring (1960)

“…all heroes and heroines trying to approximate, through barriers of pigmentation, to the Hebraico-Caucasian norm of Hollywood”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

“I come here to your beautiful country -’ Mr Raj saw through the window bare branches, coil after coil of dirty clouds, washing on neighbour lines, forlorn pecking birds, a distant brace of gasometers. ‘- your beautiful country, I say,’ he said defiantly. ‘…So far I have had mixed career. Fights and insults, complete lack of sexual sustenance - most necessary to men in prime of life - and inability to find accommodation commensurate with social position and academic attainments…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“Some young men could not afford to marry or were statutorily forbidden to do so, and then their visits to Japanese brothels engendered guilt as well as VD. The official attitude to taking brown mistresses was always ambivalent. It let the side down, but a sleeping dictionary was the only way to learn the language. Mr Butcher is good on all this, and he gives such tables as one headed ‘Ethnicity of Women from whom European Men Treated at the Sultan Street Clinic Contracted Venereal Disease, 1927-1931.’ The girls of Siam were the great infectresses, but the Malays came a close second. The Japanese, who had regular medical inspections and lived in brothels cleaner than hotels, were down with the Eurasians to 0.4% in 1931. This damnable sex, by no means to be tamed by quinine or cricket. Guilt guilt guilt….”

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

“That’s what it’s going to be then, brothers, as I come to the like end of this tale. You have been everywhere with your little droog Alex, suffering with him, and you have viddied some of the most grahzny bratchnies old Bog ever made, all on to your old droog Alex. And all it was was that I was young. But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“…jumped-up commercials pretending, too late, to be the ruling class..”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

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