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Anthony Burgess citations
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Anthony Burgess, de son nom complet John Anthony Burgess Wilson, est un écrivain, musicien et linguiste britannique, né le 25 février 1917 à Manchester et mort le 25 novembre 1993 à St. John's Wood en Londres d'un cancer du poumon. Son nom de plume, Burgess, était celui de sa mère. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. février 1917 – 22. novembre 1993
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Anthony Burgess: 299   citations 0   J'aime

Anthony Burgess Citations

“Violence makes violence”

Anthony Burgess

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

Anthony Burgess livre L'Orange mécanique

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess: Citations en anglais

“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’).”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penological theories…. Common criminals…can best be dealt with on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“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…”

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Anthony Burgess

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

“…the eyes, black, were all East - houris, harems, beds scented with Biblical spices; nose and lips were pan-Mediterranean. Her body…was that of the Shulamite and Italian film stars. The décolletage, with its promise of round, brown, infinitely smooth, vertiginous sensual treasure, was a torment to the blood…. Many had promised marriage, but all had gone home, the promise unfulfilled…. quite considerable capacity for all kinds of sensuous pleasure.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“…Your little feuilleton…recording…my crude nabob’s philistinism…”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“I had a sudden longing, like a pain, for the hot smelly East, and remembered that Everett had said something about an Indian restaurant. I asked the barman, a hot-haired Irishman, and he asked one of the business-men (who, I saw now, was a Pakistani) and then was able to tell me that the Calicut Restaurant was on Egg Street, by the Poultry Market. I went there and ate insipid dahl, tough chicken, greasy pappadams, and rice that had congealed to a pudding. The décor was depressing – brown oily wallpaper, a calendar with a Bengali pin-up (buff, deliriously plump, about thirty-eight) – and it was evident that the few Indian students were eating the special curry prepared for the staff. The manager was from Pondicherry : he caled me ‘monsieur’ and was not impressed by my complaints. At least one of the waiters was from Jamaica. I went out angry and, at a pub where the landlady sniffed in curlers, drank brandy till closing-time.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“…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….”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

“…when I went out I tried to push the door instead of pulling it. 'Pull it, mate,' said someone, and I had to obey. I nearly tripped over a footscraper and, the door closed, had the impression of loud laughter. The vile blunt-razor-blade wind blew hard from my sister’s house. I felt ashamed and furious. In the East there was politeness, doors opened the right way, there were no footscrapers.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“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.”

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Anthony Burgess

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

“[Stendhal] was small, ugly and obsessed by physical beauty in others, and he spent most of his time in salons and opera houses, pursuing aristocratic hostesses and singers. After the fall of Napoleon, he retired to Italy, adopted his pseudonym and began to write. He was a sexual freebooter who “found a notion of obtaining happiness from a virtuous woman wholly inconceivable.””

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Anthony Burgess

At 59, unmarried, syphilitic and obscure, he dropped dead in a Paris street.
"Homage to QWERT YUIOP".
Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

“Now we were the very good malchicks, smiling good evensong to one and all, though these wrinkled old lighters started to get all shook, their veiny old rookers all trembling round their glasses, and making the suds spill on the table. 'Leave us be, lads,' said one of them, her face all mappy with being a thousand years old, 'we’re only poor old women.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“The British arrived with no intention of conquest: the East India Company had set up trading posts on the western seaboard, and its officers were called on by the native sultans to help with the putting down of rapacious river barons. The parallel with India is exact, and Stamford Raffles is a perfect analogue of Robert Clive. First came trade, then the amateur protective army, finally the flag….”

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Anthony Burgess

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

“…Daudet differs from the hate-filled Baudelaire and Maupassant in being gentle to fellow-sufferers from the disease of life. Syphilis in him did not engender misanthropy.”

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Anthony Burgess

"A Pox on Literature" - review of The Horror of Life by Roger L. Williams.
Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

“…the dark brought out the prostitutes, Malay divorcees mostly, quietly moving from light to light, gaudy and graceful, like other of night’s creatures.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“Him they would not harm, Englishmen being, though infidel, yet the race of past District Officers, judges, doctors, men perhaps, in their time, more helpful than otherwise, powerful but mild.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“…I prefer to think of [young women] less as human beings than as pimply parcels of televisual reflexes.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Eve of St. Venus (1964)

“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.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

“Love seems inevitable, necessary, as normal and as easy a process as respiration.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“…the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold…”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

“Sultan Aladdin… had few illusions about his own people: amiable, well-favoured, courteous, they loved rest better than industry… their function was to remind the toiling Chinese, Indians and British of the ultimate vanity of labour.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“…. 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.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)

“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…”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“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….”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

“He seemed to lose interest in the subject of his daughter, glooming at a yellow card of ancient railway regulations on the wall. But when the harbingers of the coming train were audible – porters trundling, a scrambled gabble from the station announcer, frantic blowing on hot tea – he became eager again and was out swiftly on to the platform. I followed him. The train slid in. I saw the driver look down disdainful from his cosy hell, sharing – like soldier and auxiliary – a mystique with the tea-room woman. Passengers, disillusioned with arrival, got out greyly amid grey steam; passengers, hungry for the illusion of getting somewhere, jostled their way on.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“…it is recognised in England that home drinking is no real pleasure. We pray in a church and booze in a pub: profoundly sacerdotal at heart, we need a host in both places to preside over us. In Catholic churches as in continental bars the host is there all the time. But the Church of England kicked out the Real Presence and the licensing laws gave the landlord a terrible sacramental power. Ted was giving me grace of his own free will, holding back death – which is closing time – making a lordly grant of extra life.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“The country will absorb you and you will cease to be Victor Crabbe. You will less and less find it possible to do the work for which you were sent here. You will lose function and identity. You will be swallowed up and become another kind of eccentric. You may become a Muslim. You may forget your English, or at least lose your English accent. You may end in a kampong, no longer a foreigner, an old brownish man with many wives and children, one of the elders whom the young will be encouraged to consult on matters of the heart. You will be ruined.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“The important thing is to get yourself born. You’re entitled to that. But you’re not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End (1974)

“…English translation of the Koran. I wonder how, with such a repetitive farrago of platitudes, expressing so self-evident a theology and an ethic so puerile, Islam can have spread as it has.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

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