Anthony Burgess: Trending quotes (page 9)

“She sank again into the salty water…into the delicious warm brine-tasting depths of her grief.”

“I had always had grave doubts about Eliot's taste and, indeed, intelligence. [T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 1980]”

“The Residents knew what they wanted of their Malayan Civil Service cadets as early as 1883: "What we require out here are young public school men - Cheltenham, for preference - who have failed conspicuously at all bookwork and examinations in proportion as they have excelled at sports." As Resident of Perak, Swettenham “kept an eye out for men who would do credit to both the civil service and the state cricket team, which one sporting official judged as the equal of a good English county team.” Oliver Marks, who performed brilliantly for a visiting Ceylon eleven, was at once urged to come and work for the Perak government….”

“Tertiary syphilis, as my readers will not need reminding perhaps, comes, when it comes at all, about ten years after the initial infection. About two thirds of syphilitics miss it, especially if they are women or coloured. It is believed, though without solid evidence, that it attacks the sedentary more than the active. This means that writers and composers, granted that primary lesion, are prone to it.”

“[Youth] is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.”

“They’ll be in all our houses,’ I said, ‘blackies of all colours, before the century’s over. The new world belongs to Asia.”

“You mean,” said ‘Che Ramli, “he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.”

“Pete held his rookers and Georgie sort of hooked his rot wide open for him and Dim yanked out his false zoobies, upper and lower. He threw these down on the pavement and then I treated them to the old boot-crush, though they were hard bastards like…. The old veck began to make sort of chumbling shooms — “wuf waf wof” — so Georgie let go of holding his goobers apart and just let him have one in the toothless rot with his ringy fist, and that made the old veck start moaning a lot then, then out comes the blood, my brothers, real beautiful.”

“There was a certain creative excitement, expressed in glandular constrictions which he knew well.”

“The Turks would do anything with a captured screaming infidel body - make it chew its own penis, thrust the testicles up the anus, saw the noseless earless head off with slow delicacy.”

“…Novello should be extremely grateful that his innubile daughter was being taken off his hands by a Tasca.”

“There must always be somebody. However young or insignificant. There has to be somebody who comes from nowhere to say what others are too foolish or too frightened to say.”

“Edwin, so much himself a sham, felt a sort of kinship with the sham pleasures of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street as they travelled painfully towards Soho.”

“Find a cosy table
Inside a restaurant,
Somewhere formidable
Where you’ll be très contents.
Let your lady fair know
That she is all you see,
Prime her with a Pernod
Or three.
Watch her crack a lobster
And strip it to the buff,
Rough as when a mobster
Gets tough.
Keep the wine cascading
And you’ll ensure
Une petite spécialité called l’amour….”

“As for your circumcisions, the chief modin can arrange all. Your wine must return to the earth, whence the grape came. Haram.”

“Maugham was a mere visitor and did not have to take any language examinations; a civil servant like myself was forced to reach degree level in Malay….”

“Brutality!' cried Tristam. The class was at last interested. 'Beatings-up. Secret police. Torture in brightly lighted cellars. Condemnation without trial. Finger-nails pulled out with pincers. The rack. The cold-water treatment. The gouging out of eyes. The firing squad in the cold dawn. And all this because of disappointment. The Interphase.”

“With such exquisite women there is little need for aphrodisiacs….”

“…the prophet of harmless solace in a harsh world….”