Anthony Burgess: Trending quotes (page 5)

“Why then are the arts and sciences important? I suppose with the sciences we could say that the answer is obvious: we have radium, penicillin, television and recorded sound, motor-cars and aircraft, air-conditioning and central heating. But these achievements have never been the primary intention of science; they are a sort of by-product, the things that emerge only when the scientist has performed his main task. That task is simply stated: to be curious, to keep on asking the question 'Why?' and not to be satisfied till an answer has been found. The scientist is curious about the universe: he wants to know why water boils at one temperature and freezes at another; why cheese is different from chalk; why one person behaves differently from another. Not only 'Why?' but ‘What?' What is salt made of? What are the stars? What is the constitution of all matter? The answers to these questions do not necessarily malke our lives any easier. The answer to one question—'Can the atom be split?' - has made our lives somewhat harder. But the questions have to be asked. It is man's job to be curious; it is man's job to try to find out the truth about the world about us, to answer the big question 'What is the world really like?”

Anthony Burgess

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

Truth , World , Art , Cars

“Stamping around, waiting, I cursed England aloud, hands dug deep into pockets, dancing to the wind that knocked in vain at the Sunday shops. Cigarette-packets, football fixtures, bus-tickets sailed by in dust-ghosts of Saturday. A woman with a puce face and a blancmange-coloured prayer-book was waiting also for The Priest and Pig, and she looked puce disapproval at me. Twenty minutes late, the bus yawned in from town, near-empty, and it swallowed us in a gape of Sunday ennui. So we sundayed along, rattling and creaking in Sunday hollowness, I upstairs, tearing my elevenpenny ticket while I read the prospectus of Winter Commercial Classes stuck on the window.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Books , Tear , Winter , Waiting

“Around them the gawping locals sat, amazed with an amazement that never grew less…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“…reality’s always dull, you know…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Reality

“Pornography…. the reader panting, eventually masturbating”

Anthony Burgess

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

“He would milk the white man…. The white man had more money than sense.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Money , Sense

“…an Empire now crashing about their ears. The Sikh smiled at the vanity of human aspirations.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Smile

“She is a goddess,’ said Ambrose, drunkenly and stoutly. ‘…And she wants me. She’s the pursuer…She’s the epitome of woman, not,’ he said, ‘not a second-hand bundle of coy erogeneity draped,’ he said, ‘in an all-too-diaphanous robe,’ he said, ‘of pudeur.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Eve of St. Venus (1964)

“…as the cinema shows us, they are much more accessible and, for that matter, much more wanton than our own women”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Women

“Grimaldi and a sixteen-year-old girl still at Hollywood High. He was a good journalist but he was going to die soon. At fifty he was on a bottle and a half of Californian brandy a day and four packs of Lucky Strike. His clothes smelt as though they were seeped in tobacco juice. His white forlock was stained with it…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

Girl , Clothes

“Singapura means lion-city; prehistoric, myopic, Sanskrit-speaking visitors having spotted a mangy tiger or two in the mangroves. Sly Malays sometimes call it Singa pura-pura, which means ‘pretending to be a lion’…. It is a profoundly provincial town pretending to be a metropolis.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“…like a ship, clean and trim on a dirty sea of pox and camel-dung.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Sea

“… ‘I’ve only one hobby, and that is my wife.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, One Hand Clapping (1961)

“So she was Greek, was she?’ said Sir Benjamin. ‘Well, well. I suppose the new vice laws are driving some of them out of Soho. Driving them down here,’ he said, as though a whole new world were opening up. ‘Well.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Eve of St. Venus (1964)

World , Law

“I am near the end of the wine, sweet lords and lovely ladies, but out there the big wine is being poured – thin, slow, grey. Never more shall I taste the oncoming of this particular darkness. But I shall not be sorry to go. I am not seduced by the dainty lusts, clothed in cold green and clean linen, of an English spring. If you plunge into that dark there you will emerge at length into a raging sun and all the fabled islands of my East. And that is what I shall be doing tonight, off like a bird. I see you have your pennies ready, ladies. Twitch not, hop not about nor writhe so: I shall not be long now.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Nothing Like the Sun (1964)

Love , Spring , Bird , Rage

“They say the church spire interferes with their bloody television reception.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“I had felt sick before and had been saved by Sekt. Now I was beginning to feel sick of the Sekt. I would, I knew, shortly have to vomit…. I started gently to move towards one of the open windows. The aims of the artistic policy enunciated by the National Chamber of Film might, said Goebbels, be expressed under seven headings. Oh Christ. First, the articulation of the sense of racial pride, which might, without reprehensible arrogance, be construed as a just sense of racial superiority. Just, I thought, moving towards the breath of the autumn dark, like the Jews, just like the. This signified, Goebbels went on, not narrow German chauvinism but a pride in being of the great original Aryan race, once master of the heartland and to be so again. The Aryan destiny was enshrined in the immemorial Aryan myths, preserved without doubt in their purest form in the ancient tongue of the heartland. Second. But at this point I had made the open window. With relief the Sekt that seethed within me bore itself mouthward on waves of reverse peristalsis. Below me a great flag with a swastika on flapped gently in the night breeze of autumn. It did not now lift my heart; it was not my heart that was lifting. I gave it, with gargoyling mouth, a litre or so of undigested Sekt. And then some strings of spittle. It was not, perhaps, as good as pissing on the flag, but, in retrospect, it takes on a mild quality of emblematic defiance…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

Feeling , Autumn , Sense , Heart

“Well before James Joyce, Conrad was forging a vocabulary for the contemporary soul. This book grants us another opportunity to brood over a notable literary martyrdom.”

Anthony Burgess

review in the London Independent newspaper of Joseph Conrad: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers
People, Joseph Conrad

Books , Soul

“Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“…in the Restoration period, feeling and imagination were mistrusted: feeling implied strong convictions, and strong convictions had produced a Civil War and the harsh rule of the Commonwealth; imagination suggested the mad, the wild, the uncouth, the fanatical. It was best to live a calm civilised life governed by reason. Such a life is best lived in the town, and the town is the true centre of culture; the country estates are impoverished, and little of interest is going on there; the country itself is barbaric.”

Anthony Burgess

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

Life , War , Feeling , Imagination