Anthony Burgess: Trending quotes

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Anthony Burgess: 594 quotes12 likes

“I know what is love. Love is man and woman in bed.”

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“The great gift of the southern lands to our civilisation is the simple right to sit at an outside cafe table and look at things.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“…slang…the home-made language of the ruled, not the rulers, the acted upon, the used, the used up. It is demotic poetry emerging in flashes of ironic insight.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“I myself was, for nearly six years, in such close touch with the Malay language that it affected my English and still affects my thinking. When I wrote a novel called A Clockwork Orange, no European reader saw that the Malay word for "man" – orang – was contained in the title (Malay students of English invariably write "orang squash"…”

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)

“You drink wine, you have foreskins. These things have been observed.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

“Relief brought an aching desire to be sitting in a kedai with a large bottle of Tiger or Anchor or Carlsberg in front of him….”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“Any kind of discourse which has a flavour of the British ruling class, so powerful is ancestral memory, must be strenuously avoided.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“(Singapore) is not even a place where a white man is permitted to go to pieces….”

Anthony Burgess

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

“Writers are not, by nature, respectable: their function is to be subversive.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“The British…used to regard foreigners as either a comic turn or a sexual menace. To learn a European language…was, at best, to seek to acquire a sort of girls’-finishing-school ornament, at worst, to capitulate feebly to the enemy.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“There is a profound middle-class nostalgia for the days of British protection….”

Anthony Burgess

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

“The consciousness in [Australia and New Zealand] of the elevation of a substandard dialect into a national tongue has been responsible for a mixture of attitudes to citizens of the mother country - inferiority, defiance, contempt. A blending of the first two may be responsible for the upward intonation pattern of answers, more appropriate to questions…. slang is of its nature defiant. It is also demotic…. But the ruling class of Australia is itself demotic.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“They could hardly believe it, the retreating arses of all that Mameluke or Turkish cavalry, heathen anyway, crying heathen words as they cantered off in gunsnioke and dust-clouds, dropping spears and jewels and good Birmingham pistols. And soon it was water water water, a world of blessed water, the muddy stinking welcoming mother Nile near Rahmaniya.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

“The most sensational of all the sick literary lives was that of Maupassant, who died mad at forty-three and whose hatred of God, man and nature - manifested in literary productions which give us immense pleasure: how is that to be explained? - spring from a kind of mother fixation as well as a terror of the cold. He was a bull of a man much given to boats and riparian dalliance, but he had bad circulation. He had other things too, including a Chinese-style priapism which enabled him to copulate, usually in public, six times in a row, the secret being his failure to detumesce. This, of course, like acne and the common cold, can be a symptom of tertiary syphilis, which Maupassant certainly had.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“‘That it is still possible for a man of initiative to make money in the East is the firm opinion of balding, plump Mr Denham who adds, however, “Not if you take a wife with you.” Mr Denham has scathing things to say about Englishwomen and their lack of domestic virtues. He particularly selects their cooking as a target, but considers also that they are far inferior to the slant-eyed beauties of the Orient in the all-important matter of fidelity to their menfolk. Mr Denham is considered an authority on the women of Japan who, he says, are lovely, demure and submissive…. On his own admission he has little time for anything except money, dalliance, and the “imbibing of liquors of all kinds”.’”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“There was a silence. Outside, and most unfortunately, a boy could be heard calling to another boy: ‘Piss off, Cowie.’ Stern looks were fixed on Woolton.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Worm and the Ring (1960)

“…the bathroom which Crabbe visited showed signs that Moneypenny now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“Ted, I noted, was very busy - at the pumps, at the glasses behind, the bottles below, the merrily ringing till, like a percussion-player in some modern work who dashes with confidence from xylophone to glockenspiel to triangle to wind-machine to big drum to tambourine.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“There were…smiles of encouragement for Lydgate, and some smiles of sweet pity as well, as for the only leper present.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)