Anthony Burgess citations

“Le bien est un choix. Tout homme incapable de choisir cesse d'être un homme.”

“What I do I do because I like to do.”

“Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.”

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

“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”

“I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.”

“It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.”

“Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?”

“But what happens when you die?' 'You’re finished with,' Enderby said promptly. 'Done for. And even if you weren’t – well, you die then, gasp your last, then you’re sort of wandering, free of body. You wander around and then you come in contact with a sort of big thing. What is this big thing? God, if you like.”

“My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches [things] I had done…and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world.”

“The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.”

“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.”

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

“It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”

“What's it going to be then, eh?”

“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?”

“If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.”

“If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.”

“This must be a real horrorshow film if you're so keen on my viddying it.”

“Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.”

“Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.”

“Civilised my syphilised yarbles.”

“The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.”

“The next morning I woke up at oh eight oh oh hours, my brothers, and as I still felt shagged and fagged and fashed and bashed and my glazzies were stuck together real horrorshow with sleepglue, I thought I would not go to school.”

“Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions, when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.”

“It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.”

“Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?”

“I was always on my oddy knocky.”

“We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.”

“Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.”