Anthony Burgess: Trending quotes

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Anthony Burgess: 594 quotes12 likes

“That night we visited various places where well-shaped and scented, though completely naked, Japanese girls came to sit on male knees.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“If the world is to be improved it must be by the exercise of individual charity.”

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965)

“The lure of Egypt, gentlemen, and the greater exotic lure of the lands beyond. The East – does not our way lie there? Europe shall, after tomorrow, be wholly ours. We do not wish America or Africa, shapeless savage continents with no future. But ah, the East. India, China, fabulous Japan. And, of course,’ with a fierce savagery replacing the mystic look, ‘we have the mission of striking at the enemy of mankind in that very East where he has so precarious a toehold”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

“England become a feeble-lighted Moon of America…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, One Hand Clapping (1961)

“…of course, keep-fit people are no good in bed…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“If you reject family - which a mother holds together - as well as the ties of Church and State, is there anything left for you?”

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965)

“…my two chronic diseases of gluttony and satyriasis…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Tremor of Intent (1966)

“And then there were the sick to be transported back to Cairo (where already the holy war might have spread like the bubonic and smiling beards above gelder’s knives be waiting at the gates), and how in the name of filthy castrating Allah did you march men back through the Sinai who couldn’t even sit a mule? He reviewed the sweating patients in gloom, all distorted with bubos…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

“I know little about the women of my own race…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“All that the Malays can do is run the police force and the army…. They are not fitted even to the lowlier mechanical skills, such as car maintenance. They are essentially a people who have been pulled out of the kampongs into the towns, and the town in Malaysia seems essentially a Chinese creation….”

Anthony Burgess

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

“…the snarling, whining, pampered, analphabetic humanoids of Hollywood emerge as garbage irrelevantly gilded with adventitious photogeneity.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“I lay a little while, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated, smoking a cigarette that should have been postcoital but was not.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

“The dog looked up through its hairy yashmak and farted.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“All right,” said Rowlandson. He began shakily to count out notes. Near-broken, he was still an Englishman; he would not bargain.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

“The greater part of the time I spent, when I talked at all, talking to men. I liked to take luncheon in some pub or other, sitting on a high stool at the snack-counter, barons of beef, hams, salads and dishes of pickle spread before me, the server in his tall white cap carving with skill. Other male eaters would be wedged against me, champing over newspapers, and there were a peculiar animal content in being among warm silent men, raising glasses in smacking silent toasts to themselves, the automatic ‘ah’ after the draught, the forkful of red beef and mustard pickle. Sitting with my gin or whisky afterwards I would often manage to get into conversation with some lonely man or other – usually an exile like myself – and the talk would be about the world, air-routes and shipping-lines, drinking-places thousands of miles away. Then I felt happy, felt I had come home, because home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“We're in control, and we have what we want!”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beard's Roman Women (1976)

“…I’m a typical Englishman of my class - a crank idealist.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“I am late with the new Doris Lessing [The Golden Notebook]. I make no apology: it has taken me a long time to read (568 pages of close print) and at the end of it all I feel cheated. This talented writer has attempted an experiment which has failed, essayed a scale which is beyond her…. This is a book of revolt – political, social, sexual. Anna [the heroine] became a Communist in South Africa, seeing in Communism a "moral energy" not to be found in other creeds or in the long-entrenched privileged class. Anna is also concerned with being a "free woman" – rebelling against traditional male dominance – and with achieving maximal erotic fulfilment…. There is no doubt about the great moral virtues here – intelligence, honesty, integrity – but it is the aesthetic virtues that seem to be lacking. The characters do not really interest us: when we have dialogue it is strangely unnatural … Mrs Lessing’s old singleness of vision, her strength as a writer, is not to be found here. [Review in the English provincial newspaper the Yorkshire Post, 1962]”

Anthony Burgess

People, Joseph Conrad, Doris Lessing

“…the Malay word chium meant to plough the beloved’s face with one’s nose”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“In China he had spoken good Mandarin, and in ten years this had become his first tongue. Here he found himself with a parish of Hokkien and Cantonese speakers and a few English people whose language he could hardly talk. His French, severed from its sources of nourishment, grown coarse through lack of use, halted and wavered, searching for the right word which Mandarin was always ready to supply.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)