1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess Quotes
page 2

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
Anthony Burgess: 297   quotes 12   likes

Anthony Burgess Quotes

“…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Feeling

“Lydgate opened the sort of letter…”My dear husband I very good…I come in flying ship…we be very happy…love.” It was as satisfactory a letter as he had ever received from a woman.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

Love , Flying , Happiness

“Vorpal had the trick of adding a Malay enclitic to his utterances. This also had power to irritate, especially in the mornings. It irritated Nabby Adams that this should irritate him, but somewhere at the back of his brain was the contempt of the man learned in languages for the silly show-off, jingling the small change of ‘wallah’ and charpoy…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Learning , Change

“…Women I do not much care for myself - I prefer little Greek shepherd-boys…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Tremor of Intent (1966)

Women , Boy

“…a victim of bad medicine, bad air, bad food, farcical education, a despicable popular culture.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, 1985 (1978)

Education , Food

“Disgusting, ridiculous, when other people did it.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

People

“I knew im, she knew im, e knew im, we all knew im.’ After this paradigm, which impressed his hearers, he paused. ‘E was a customer ere. Not perhaps one of the best customers. Not like Roger Alliwell ere oo drinks whisky to the tune of near one bottle a day, which is good for the ouse and, as far as we can see, does imself no arm. But e was a customer, loyal to the ouse, regular in attendance, and that’s all we ask of any man or woman for that matter. Well, now e’s gone. We’re sorry e’s gone. You’re sorry e’s gone. I’m sorry e’s gone. And we can’t say much more than that. Now the question is: is e gone to a better place? I don’t know the answer to that, nor do you, nor does she. Perhaps e knows,’ said Ted, shrugging towards the vicar, ‘because it’s is job to know. But the rest of us don’t know. Right. But I say this. E done is best for all. Never a ard word come out of that man’s art. Right. Well loved e was and for all is faults we would love im still, if e was still alive. But e’s dead now and we wish im all the best in is new destination. And I can’t say no fairer than that.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Love , Art , Drink , Question

“Men are influenced by big loud empty words, styes which swell the eyelids and impede vision of the truth.”

Anthony Burgess

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

Men , Truth

“I should want to go home, like Fenella. I should be so tired of the shambles here, the obscurantism, the colour-prejudice, the laziness and ignorance, as to desire nothing better than a headship in a cold stone country school in England. But I love this country. I feel protective towards it. Sometimes just before dawn breaks, I feel that somehow I enclose it, contain it. I feel that it needs me. This is absurd, because snakes and scorpions are ready to bite me, a drunken Tamil is prepared to knife me, the Chinese in the town would like to spit at me, some day a Malay boy will run amok and try to tear me apart. But it doesn’t matter. I want to live here; I want to be wanted. Despite the sweat, despite the fever, the prickly heat, the mosquitoes, the terrorists, the fools at the bar of the club, despite Fenella.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Love , School , Fools , Feeling

“Sit like a fool then, crassly emptying
Glass after wineglass in some foul tavern,
Watching the night and its candles gutter,
Snoring at sunrise.
In England now the wind blows high
And clouds brush rudely at the sky;
The blood runs thinly through my frame,
I half-caress the hearthstone’s flame,
Oppressed by autumn’s desolate cry.
Then homesick for the south am I,
For where the lucky swallows fly,
But each warm land is just a name
In England now.
The luckless workers I espy
With chins dipped low and collars high,
Walk into winter, do not blame
The shifting globe. A gust of shame
Represses my unmanly sigh
In England now.”

Anthony Burgess

English Literature: A Survey for Students.
Poetry

Fools , Autumn , Winter , Cry

“…enjoyed Dravidian transports.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Tremor of Intent (1966)

“…the whole world here breathed easy concupiscence…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

World

“it excites the pancreas to fresh efforts”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

Effort

“…Just you bloody hypocrites with your four wives and your ten thousand houris in heaven?…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

“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

“…for thy huggest thy bolster, which men call a Dutch wife in some parts.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

Men , Parting

“Nabby Adams, supine on the bed, grunted. It was four o’clock in the morning and he did not want to be talking. He had had a confused coloured dream about Bombay, shot with sharp pangs of unpaid bills. Over it all had brooded thirst, thirst for a warmish bottle of Tiger beer. Or Anchor. Or Carlsberg. He said, 'Did you bring any beer back with you?”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Dreams , Beer

“There he lieth, tossing in the guilt of his lewdness, the primal lecher, neglectful of his duties to a fair wife but all too ready to plunge his sizzling steel into the slaking black mud of a base Indian.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Nothing Like the Sun (1964)

“As I walked towards travel, that illusion of liberation, I strangely felt myself walking back into childhood.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Travel , Childhood

“The church stands that it may be battered, but the fists that batter know their own impotence.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“The East would always present that calm face of faint astonishment, unmoved at the anger, not understanding the bitterness.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Understanding , Anger

“The rain eased off, but the streets were greasily wet, rainbowed with oil. I went to the bank for more five-pound notes, stood like a pauper in the public library reading the Christian Science Monitor, then went for the first drinks of the day to a dive-bar popular with merchants. Hungarian refugees waited on at the tables and a West Indian negro collected dirty glasses – we were all exiles together.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Drink , Science , Waiting , Reading

“He stayed in no one place very long, but he usually managed to absorb something of the atmosphere of each town, village or rubber estate he visited, and he always made quick contact with the local residents. These residents were invariably Europeans - planters, colonial officials, businessmen, or just men living in exile to escape from trouble or sadness at home - and there is little evidence that Maugham gained, or wished to gain, any direct knowledge of the lives and customs of the native peoples of the East. This must be disappointing to present-day Malay and Indian and Chinese and Eurasian readers of his stories, but we have to remember that (apart from the fact that Maugham had no time to learn Malay or Chinese or Tamil) the Western attitude to the Far East was very different in Maugham's time from what it is today.”

Anthony Burgess

Introduction to Maugham's Malaysian Stories (1969)
People, Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham

Men , People , Sadness , Disappointment

“Carlo looked as at the world of fallen man on the endless suburbs that passed for a city, an eatery in the likeness of a Sphinx (enter between its forepaws), another, for jumbo malts so thick you can't suck 'em through a straw, in the form of an elephant crouched as at the bidding of its mahout, gimcrack temples of various faiths, attap roofs of nutburger stands with Corinthian columns, loans loans loans, stores crammed with cutprice radios, a doughnuttery, homes like Swiss chalets, like Bavarian castles, miniature Blenheims, Strawberry Hills, Taj Mahals, a bank in the form of a tiny ocean liner, dusty trees on the boulevards (datepalm, orange, oleander), bars with neon bottles endlessly pouring, colleges for stuntmen, beauticians, morticians, degrees in drummajoretteship.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

World , Faith , Home , Tree

“Outside, the main doors behind him, he was hit full in the chest by autumn. The doggy wind leapt about him and nipped; leaves skirred along the pavement, the scrape of the ferrules of sticks; melancholy, that tetrasyllable, sat on a plinth in the middle of the square. English autumn, and the whistling tiny souls of the dead round the war memorial.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Doctor is Sick (1960)

War , Soul , Autumn , Memory

“She was an appetising woman with a full-cheeked smile, about thirty, a Nordic blonde but not icy, though ice was suggested in its tamed winter-sport aspects : the flush after skating, log-fires and hot rum and butter, fine heavy thighs, that would warm your hand like a muff, under a skirt that had swirled in a rink waltz. Her beaver lamb coat was thrust back from a green suit : solid charms, thoroughly wholesome, were indicated.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Smile , Sport , Winter

“Yes yes yes, later. For now I would ask you to proclaim next Friday from the mimbar in the masjid that the French are protectors of the faith and friends of the Prophet.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Faith

“…he became one with his Chinese parishioners, announcing a trade as honest as that of the dentist, the seller of rice-wine, the brothel-keeper, the purveyor of quack rejuvenators and aphrodisiacs, or the vendor of shark’s-fin strips.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Wine

“You are admitting, then, to frivolity of attitude to important global problems?”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Problem

“Lim Cheng Po, Anglican, Royalist, cricketer, respectable husband and father, allowed his animal reflexes out for an avenue walk on the lead.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

Animals