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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

“A white woman tipsy at the club, discoursing sexual needs unsatisfied by an overworked and debilitated husband, was a great topic of scandal in the bazaar. It was a man’s world, and a realistic planter or government officer should have been content with beery sodality and the odd session with a geisha or perempuan jahat. But these men had been to decent schools and were romantic. It was the same in Burma, as Orwell reminds us. The French suffered less.”

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Anthony Burgess

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

“Howarth began to see that, however much it was against one’s will and convictions, sides had to be taken, the dreary corrupt world of politics had to be entered by the good and dispassionate, to protect and avenge the weak. But one always entered too late.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Worm and the Ring (1960)

“We," he said, not without complacency, "are different. We attest the divine paradox. We are barren only to be fertile. We proclaim the primary reality of the world of the spirit which has an infinitude of mansions for an infinitude of human souls. And you too are different. Your destiny is of the rarest kind. You will live to proclaim the love of Christ for man and man for Christ in a figure of earthly love." Preacher's rhetoric; it would have been better in Italian, which thrives on melodious meaninglessness.
I said, with the same weariness as before, "My destiny is to live in a state of desire both church and state condemn and to grow sourly rich in the purveying of a debased commodity. I've just finished a novel which, when I'd read it through in typescript, made me feel sick to my stomach. And yet it's what people want -- the evocation of a past golden time when there was no Mussolini or Hitler or Franco, when gods were paid for with sovereigns, Elgar's Symphony Number One in A flat trumpeted noblimente a massive hope in the future, and the romantic love of a shopgirl and a younger son of the aristocracy portended a healthful inflection but not destruction of the inherited social pattern. Comic servants and imperious duchesses. Hansom cabs and racing at Ascot. Fascists and democrats alike will love it. My destiny is to create a kind of underliterature that lacks all whiff of the subversive.”

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Anthony Burgess

"Don't," Carlo said, "underestimate yourself."
Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

“Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“Paresis, as it is generally called in preference to the old GPI or general paralysis of the insane, is characterized by symptoms of bewildering variety, confirming the description of syphilis as the Great Imitator or, because of this very wealth of its ultimate manifestations, the Aristocrat of Diseases. Paresis involves a meningoencephalitis which marks its onset by personality changes, mild at first but growing steadily worse. There is irritability, failure of memory and judgement, insomnia, slovenliness, aggression, confusion, delusion, manic depression, epileptiform convulsion, slurred speech, incontinence, emaciation, sensational psychosis, finally death. The act of careless bohemian love, anonymous, quick and uncondomized, is proved not to have been worth the trouble or money…..”

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Anthony Burgess

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

“…even the police discussed this violence as possibly coming within the scope of their terms of reference.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“We know what goes on in the act of love, and those of us who are writers despair of ever finding verbal equivalents for the pain and pleasure of excitation fulfilled in what Rabelais’s translator Urquhart called ‘venerean ecstasy’. A mechanical description of the act tells us nothing, any more than a scientifically accurate account of mastication will convey the flavour of roast duck.”

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Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence (1985)

“Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned. The questioning of linguistic conventions is one of the main duties of what we call literature.”

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Anthony Burgess

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

“…today’s…newspapers…full of…diminishing exports, the unkillable widening grin of the pullulating East, the expanding machine of the almighty infallible State…. He himself could only turn to the past, but he heard that it was already possible to change the past, bringing the past perpetually up to date, a perpetual jackal fawning on the present, a malleable witness with no qualms about perjury. He knew that the armies were on the march, the Tannoys blaring, the collective mind – tool of oligarchy – being fashioned under the anaesthetic of the catchphrase and the mass entertainment…”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Eve of St. Venus (1964)

“Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally - that was a man’s life.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“Rosemary’s reputation was known; he would, by obscure logic, become retrospectively a cuckold.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“She sank again into the salty water…into the delicious warm brine-tasting depths of her grief.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“I had always had grave doubts about Eliot's taste and, indeed, intelligence. [T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 1980]”

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Anthony Burgess

People, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot

“The Residents knew what they wanted of their Malayan Civil Service cadets as early as 1883: "What we require out here are young public school men - Cheltenham, for preference - who have failed conspicuously at all bookwork and examinations in proportion as they have excelled at sports." As Resident of Perak, Swettenham “kept an eye out for men who would do credit to both the civil service and the state cricket team, which one sporting official judged as the equal of a good English county team.” Oliver Marks, who performed brilliantly for a visiting Ceylon eleven, was at once urged to come and work for the Perak government….”

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Anthony Burgess

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

“Tertiary syphilis, as my readers will not need reminding perhaps, comes, when it comes at all, about ten years after the initial infection. About two thirds of syphilitics miss it, especially if they are women or coloured. It is believed, though without solid evidence, that it attacks the sedentary more than the active. This means that writers and composers, granted that primary lesion, are prone to it.”

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Anthony Burgess

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

“[Youth] is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“They’ll be in all our houses,’ I said, ‘blackies of all colours, before the century’s over. The new world belongs to Asia.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“You mean,” said ‘Che Ramli, “he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“Pete held his rookers and Georgie sort of hooked his rot wide open for him and Dim yanked out his false zoobies, upper and lower. He threw these down on the pavement and then I treated them to the old boot-crush, though they were hard bastards like…. The old veck began to make sort of chumbling shooms — “wuf waf wof” — so Georgie let go of holding his goobers apart and just let him have one in the toothless rot with his ringy fist, and that made the old veck start moaning a lot then, then out comes the blood, my brothers, real beautiful.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“There was a certain creative excitement, expressed in glandular constrictions which he knew well.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“The Turks would do anything with a captured screaming infidel body - make it chew its own penis, thrust the testicles up the anus, saw the noseless earless head off with slow delicacy.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

“…Novello should be extremely grateful that his innubile daughter was being taken off his hands by a Tasca.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

“There must always be somebody. However young or insignificant. There has to be somebody who comes from nowhere to say what others are too foolish or too frightened to say.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

“Edwin, so much himself a sham, felt a sort of kinship with the sham pleasures of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street as they travelled painfully towards Soho.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Doctor is Sick (1960)

“Find a cosy table
Inside a restaurant,
Somewhere formidable
Where you’ll be très contents.
Let your lady fair know
That she is all you see,
Prime her with a Pernod
Or three.
Watch her crack a lobster
And strip it to the buff,
Rough as when a mobster
Gets tough.
Keep the wine cascading
And you’ll ensure
Une petite spécialité called l’amour….”

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Anthony Burgess livre Earthly Powers

Earthly Powers.
Poetry

“As for your circumcisions, the chief modin can arrange all. Your wine must return to the earth, whence the grape came. Haram.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

“Maugham was a mere visitor and did not have to take any language examinations; a civil servant like myself was forced to reach degree level in Malay….”

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Anthony Burgess

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

“Brutality!' cried Tristam. The class was at last interested. 'Beatings-up. Secret police. Torture in brightly lighted cellars. Condemnation without trial. Finger-nails pulled out with pincers. The rack. The cold-water treatment. The gouging out of eyes. The firing squad in the cold dawn. And all this because of disappointment. The Interphase.”

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Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Wanting Seed (1962)

“With such exquisite women there is little need for aphrodisiacs….”

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Anthony Burgess

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

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