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Anthony Burgess Quotes
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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

“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

Books , Feeling , Intelligence , Communication

“…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)

People , Search

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

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

Love

“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)

Home

“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)

Thinking

“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)

Memory

“(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)

Nature

“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)

School , Girl , Learning

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

Anthony Burgess

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

Art

“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)

Nostalgia

“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)

Question , Nature , Country

“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)

World , Water , Cry

“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)

God , Pleasure , Secret , Spring

“‘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)

Love , Women , Money , Beauty

“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)

Boy , Silence

“…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)

Confidence , Business

“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)

Smile

“We can no longer expect the one big book, the single achievement, to be an author's claim to posterity's regard. We shall be more inclined to assess the stature of a novelist by his ability to create what the French call an oeuvre, to present fragments of an individual vision in book after book, to build, if not a War and Peace or Ulysses, at least a shelf.”

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction (1967)

War , Books , Peace

“An Egyptian priest…. plays up the mystery of language to enhance his own power.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“In a sense [Lawrence] is the patron saint of all writers who have never had an Oxford or Cambridge education who are somewhat despised by those who have.”

Anthony Burgess book 1985

'The Rage of D.H. Lawrence', The South Bank Show (TV), 1985
People, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence

Education , Sense

“He walked down the side street to a wide thoroughfare of shop-windows and offices. This, he assumed, was one of the main arteries of London, a city he did not know very well. There were sodium street-lights, lights in windows. Occasional cars sped by. There was even an airline bus crammed with yawning passengers. Edwin saw himself reflected in a window full of tape-recorders.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Doctor is Sick (1960)

Cars , Light

“…You know what they call you expatriates? White leeches.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

“Europeans had sometimes invited him to dinner and given him stuffed aubergines and onion soup and Nuits St Georges and what they said was good coffee.…They had evinced, in their curious French mixed with Malay (both were foreign languages, both occupied the same compartment, they were bound to get mixed), a nostalgia for France which amused him slightly, bored him much, flattered him not at all.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Coffee , Nostalgia

“Mr Liversedge…saw the whole ridiculous Oriental susah in true proportion. Here men would murder for five dollars, here men would seek divorce because their wives sighed at the handsomeness of the film star P. Ramlee…. nodding at the lucid exposition of Mr Lim from Penang, though contemning inwardly the Pommie accent…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

Men , Star

“…Australian English may be thought of as a kind of fossilised Cockney of the Dickensian era.”

Anthony Burgess

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

“…And the rising sun shall rise yet higher, destroying with its flaming fire the evil will of the wicked West, but smiling warmly on the rest”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

Smile , Evil , Sun

“They saw themselves, you could see, as real grown-up devotchkas already, what with the old hipswing when they saw your Faithful Narrator, brothers, and padded groodies and red all ploshed on their goobers…. They viddied themselves as real sophistoes…. They had the same ideas or lack of, and the same colour hair — a like dyed strawy. Well, they would grow up real today…. No school this afterlunch, but education certain, Alex as teacher.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Education , School , Faith , Idea

“…1660 virtually starts a new era - an era in which the old land-owning class sinks and the new middle-class rises, an era too in which the English character seems to have become subtly changed. A sense of guilt seems to permeate all pleasure, and this has continued to the present day…. the many living monuments to Puritan rule…. the Englishman’s peculiar restraint - the coldness that repels so many Africans and Asians, an unwillingness to ‘let oneself go’.”

Anthony Burgess

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

Pleasure , Sense , Change

“Dr Williams’s book is about a number of nineteenth-century French writers who caught syphilis and probably died of paresis. They are Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Daudet. A similar book could probably be written about nineteenth-century British writers, including such unlikely victims of syphilis as John Keats and Edward Lear. People were not so frightened of the disease as we are. Few physicians saw the connection between cerebral degeneration and the primary chancre: when the secondary stage of the infection had healed, it was generally assumed that everything was over and lightning would not strike the tree again. This was Baudelaire’s belief. One could even rejoice at picking up the pox: it was not merely an inoculation; it advertised one’s virility to the world….”

Anthony Burgess

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

People , Books , World , Disease

“Defiling their shadows, infidels, accursed of Allah, with fingernails that are foot-long daggers, with mouths agape like cauldrons full of teeth on the boil, with eyes all fire, shaitans possessed of Iblis, clanking into their wars all linked, like slaves, with iron chains. Murad Bey, the huge, the single-blowed ox-beheader, saw without too much surprise mild-looking pale men dressed in blue, holding guns, drawn up in squares six deep as though in some massed dance depictive of orchard walls. At the corners of the squares were heavy giins and gunners. There did not seem to be many horsemen. Murad said a prayer within, raised his scimitar to heaven and yelled a fierce and holy word. The word was taken up, many thousandfold, and in a kind of gloved thunder the Mamelukes threw themselves on to the infidel right and nearly broke it. But the squares healed themselves at once, and the cavalry of the faithful crashed in three avenging prongs along the fire-spitting avenues between the walls. A great gun uttered earthquake language at them from within a square, and, rearing and cursing the curses of the archangels of Islam on to the uncircumcized, they wheeled and swung towards their protective village of Embabeh. There they encountered certain of the blue-clad infidel horde on the flat roofs of the houses, coughing musket-fire at them. But then disaster sang along their lines from the rear as shell after shell crunched and the Mamelukes roared in panic and burden to the screams of their terrified mounts, to whose ears these noises were new. Their rear dissolving, their retreat cut off, most sought the only way, that of the river. They plunged in, horseless, seeking to swim across to join the inactive horde of Ibrahim, waiting for. action that could now never come. Murad Bey, with such of his horsemen as were left, yelped off inland to Gizeh.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Men , War , Faith , Way

“Whether the French were better colonists than the British is an academic question, but at least such Frenchmen as were planting in Malaya (Pierre Boulle, for instance, and Henri Fauconnier) were kept sane by their own culture and some of them (those two, anyway) produced memorable novels based on their Malayan experiences. The British were mostly philistines, and they left behind a heritage of philistinism. Kampung culture is dying, and a metropolitan culture of art galleries and orchestras seems unlikely to arise. What there is, and flourishing too, is a materialist consumerism that is threatened from the north by the communists and from the west by the militant Islam of the ayatollahs. Mr Butcher’s book deals with a race of people who may well be surveyed in terms of anthropological generalities. There was no room for the brilliant or the eccentric. British Malaya was created by courageous and suffering mediocrities. The building of Singapore in 1819 was a rather different affair.”

Anthony Burgess

"White Men Sweating" - review of The British in Malaya 1880-1941: The Social History of a European Community in Colonial South-East Asia, by John G. Butcher.
Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

People , Books , Art , Courage

“…surely that sneered-at suburban life was more stable than this shadow life…in a country where no involvement was possible…better than the sordid dalliance that soothed me after work?”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Life , Country

“His heart beating faster, his throat drying, Nabby whispered to the driver, ‘Not so bloody fast.’
‘Tuan?’
‘All right, all right.’ One of these days he must really get down to the language. There never seemed to be the time, somehow….”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Time , Heart

“The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Tremor of Intent (1966)

Life

“He forgot that the Malays revere cats and that the Chinese merely relish them.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Cats

“What you could do with is a nice strong cup of tea, sir. I’ll tell the kuki to make you one.’
‘Does it really do any good, Nabby? (That was better.) ‘I’ve tried every damn thing.’….”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Strong , Tea

“Legrand scratched his cheek with one of Conté's lead pencils and started to Koranize: I say unto you that you have been brought low by kings who lie with houris on the fat sofas of Stamboul and by those that were once among you and came from lands of the sunset, men pale but warlike, to steal your camels and women and snatch the bread from your teeth, in no wise to raise you high among the peoples of the earth. Meanwhile the C-in-C got on with other things - gunpowder factory, street-lighting, Paris-style café, accommodation for laundresses, a balloon demonstration.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Women , Men , People , Lie

“From ancient drains and sewers of the language (maritime inns and brothels…), from scrawls in the catacombs…whoremasters’ chapbooks…the vocabulary of tavern brawls”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

““…My name…is Mahalingam…. is Sanskrit for ‘large or great or mighty generative organ’ - this, of course, having more a religious (through associations of religion and fertility) significance than an anatomical one. Though anatomically and…socially the name has not proved inept.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

Religion

“…a fetid cabaret with a beer-bar, two houses of ill-fame disguised as coffee-shops…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

Coffee , Beer , Housing

“…in the bar, he treated me and all around us to a loud recapitulation, based loosely on the visas and entry permits in his passport, of the more scandalous elements of our life together. ‘New York, dear, and that pissyarsed publisher of yours who tried to stop me going to the fistfuck party, dangerous he said, lethal, stupid sod. Toronto, that was where we had that little whatsit at the same time, remember, lovely kind of henna colour, half Indian, half French, not an ounce of bloody Anglosaxon blood remember.’ He got drunk very rapidly on undiluted Pernod. ‘The man on the Washington Post who once had it off with a ghost. At the…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

Love , Life , Stupidity , Time

“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

Birthday