Anthony Burgess: Man

“Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

Evil

“Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Variant: When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
Source: A Clockwork Orange

“Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

God , Way

“Is this really true? If we take an average day in the life of the average man we seem to see very little evidence of concern with the sciences and the arts. The average man gets up, goes to work, eats his meals, reads the newspapers, watches television, goes to the cinema, goes to bed, sleeps, wakes up, starts all over again. Unless we happen to be professional scientists, laboratory experiments and formulae have ceased to have any meaning for most of us; unless we happen to be poets or painters or musicians—or teachers of literature, painting, and music—the arts seem to us to be only the concern of schoolchildren. And yet people have said, and people still say, that the great glories of our civilisation are the scientists and artists. Ancient Greece is remembered because of mathematicians like Euclid and Pythagoras, because of poets like Homer and dramatists like Sophocles. In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.”

Anthony Burgess

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

Life , People , Age , Art

“It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original - with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.”

Anthony Burgess

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

Education , Reading

“Her face was that of a boy gang-leader, smooth with the innocence of one who, by the same quirk as blinds a man to the mystery of whistling or riding a bicycle, has never mastered the art of affection or compassion or properly learned the moral dichotomy.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Art , Boy , Learning

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Mr Raj had been purely Orientally and fancifully complimentary (‘So great a man, his lingam as long and thick as a tree, the father of whole villages’).”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Tree

“At various universities, I've seen black men who are treated very indulgently, over-indulgently. They are allowed to do what they want, take what they want, drop what they want. I met one young man in Philadelphia, a young black, who wanted to learn music. But he wouldn't learn music from whites because it was 'tainted' music. Well, this is bloody ridiculous…”

Anthony Burgess

remark made in 1971, cited in Roger Lewis, Anthony Burgess (2002), p. 152
General

Men , Music , Learning , Universe

“…the sin of gluttony, also the sin of lecherous intent toward an honourable and high-placed matron…. But more sin is to come, and that sin a double one, namely of lechery in act, perhaps venial in the young but by no means to be condoned, and of adultery, which Saint John saith shall be punished by fire for the act and brimstone for the stink of the ordure of the partners in that sin…. She is but a heathen…. With the instinct of her kind she knoweth the best and most secret places for lechery…. thou are bent on sin, the act of darkness…. On her breath is no honey but the smell of strong drink, the potent mingling of barley and juniper in deadly ferment…. One man is from the Antipodes but, contrary to the superstition of the vulgar, he is like other men…. It is he who seeth the cabin where thy lust worketh itself out, he remembereth lewd advice of the charioteer of Cathay…. approacheth on tiptoe the sound of beastly gratification…. Lust croucheth now above in the rooftree, his wings fearfully foldeth…. But in his rage he spareth not her, calling her Jezebel and harlot….”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

Men , Secret , Drink , Strong

“The story of English literature, viewed aesthetically, is one thing; the story of English writers is quite another. The price of contributing to the greatest literature the world has ever seen is often struggle and penury: art is still too often its own reward. It is salutary sometimes to think of the early deaths of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Chatterton, Dylan Thomas, of the Grub Street struggles of Dr. Johnson, the despair of Gissing and Francis Thompson. That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.”

Anthony Burgess

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

Death , World , Beauty , Art

“My dear Hardman,
It was pleasant… I am sorry that your Oriental venture has not been going as well as you expected. But, then, I think that the days when a man could expect to make his fortune in the East are dead and gone. Indeed, the time seems to have come for the reverse of the old process to apply, and for the East to dominate the West.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Thinking , Time , Dead

“…workmen who wanted (a) the white man out…,(c) sinecures”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

“…. There was a good deal of drunkenness - … There was lechery, nakedness. It was a warm afternoon,’ he added, as if to excuse the nakedness….
‘I saw the ceremony between the Empress and Gaius Silius and I assumed it was all a game. There was a great deal of laughter and little solemnity. Then the marriage or mock marriage was …. consummated at once and in public. And, in sympathy as it were, the other guests - A great mass of naked bodies. Men and women. Fornication for them. There were boys there too, Ganymedes. ….
‘And when does Gaius Silius think he can strike the blow that will secure him the imperial c -’
I do not think,’ Narcissus said, ‘that Gaius Silius has such an ambition. He is a weak man besotted by the erotic, no more.”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)

Women , Men , Marriage , Game

“And make up your mind about what bloody race you belong to. One minute it’s all about being a farmer’s boy in Northamptonshire and the next you’re on about the old days in Calcutta and what the British have done to Mother India and the snake-charmers and the bloody temple-bells. Ah, wake up, for God’s sake. You’re English right enough but you’re forgetting how to speak the bloody language, what with traipsing about with Punjabis and Sikhs and God knows what. You talk Hindustani in your sleep, man. Sort it out, for God’s sake. If you want to put a loincloth on, get cracking, but don’t expect the privileges --’ (the word came out in a wet blurr; the needle stuck for a couple of grooves) ‘the privileges, the privileges…”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

God , Boy , Sleep , Forgetting

“Goebbels…now made an applauded entrance. He was no man to improvise a word or two of greeting; he had typewritten sheets…. He spoke of the cinema as the popular voice of the state…those products, themselves a means of cleansing the world film market through their purity and excellence of the regrettable decadent ordures excreted by international Jewry….”

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

World