Anthony Burgess (Writer)

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.

— Anthony Burgess people

It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.

— Anthony Burgess art

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

— Anthony Burgess men

Every dogma has its day.

— Anthony Burgess day

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

— Anthony Burgess think

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

— Anthony Burgess live

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

— Anthony Burgess money

I didn't think; I experimented.

— Anthony Burgess men

If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.

— Anthony Burgess believe

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

— Anthony Burgess light

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

— Anthony Burgess men

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

— Anthony Burgess reading

The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.

— Anthony Burgess mind

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

— Anthony Burgess great

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

— Anthony Burgess books

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

— Anthony Burgess men

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

— Anthony Burgess men

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

— Anthony Burgess art

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

— Anthony Burgess novel

He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.

— Anthony Burgess art

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

— Anthony Burgess evil

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

— Anthony Burgess right

The subjects we study at school can be divided roughly into two groups—the sciences and the arts. The sciences include mathematics, geography, chemistry, physics, and so on. Among the arts are drawing, painting, modelling, needlework, drama, music, literature. The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.

— Anthony Burgess life

Oh, love, love, love — Love on a hilltop high, Love against a cloudless sky, Love where the scene is Painted by a million stars, Love with martinis In the cabarets and bars. Oh, love, love, loveBeds in the East.

— Anthony Burgess love

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 work

A heavy task, but there was light relief In the Germanic ambience, boisterous, brash, Torchlit parades and pogroms, guttural grief In emigration queues, the smash and crash Of pawnshop windows by insentient beef In uniform, the gush of beer, the splash Of schnapps, the joy of being drunk and Aryan, Though Hitler was a teetotalitarian. Human pain meant But little in the Gulf Wars visual grammar, a Big feast of death to feed the cinecameraByrne

— Anthony Burgess death

All that the Malays can do is run the police force and the army. They are not fitted even to the lowlier mechanical skills, such as car maintenance. They are essentially a people who have been pulled out of the kampongs into the towns, and the town in Malaysia seems essentially a Chinese creation.

— Anthony Burgess people

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

— Anthony Burgess violence

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.Earthly Powers.

— Anthony Burgess art

I am near the end of the wine, sweet lords and lovely ladies, but out there the big wine is being poured – thin, slow, grey. Never more shall I taste the oncoming of this particular darkness. But I shall not be sorry to go. I am not seduced by the dainty lusts, clothed in cold green and clean linen, of an English spring. If you plunge into that dark there you will emerge at length into a raging sun and all the fabled islands of my East. And that is what I shall be doing tonight, off like a bird. I see you have your pennies ready, ladies. Twitch not, hop not about nor writhe so: I shall not be long now.

— Anthony Burgess love

Penang is a paradise, and east coast Kelantan has beautiful Malay women who walk proudly ahead of their husbands and scorn Koranic purdah.

— Anthony Burgess women

The Christian ecumenical movement will have reached its limit, meaning that Catholicism will have turned into Protestantism and Protestantism into agnosticism.But Islam will not have lost any of its rigour.Supernature abhors a supervacuum. With the death of institutional Christianity will come the spread of Islam.

— Anthony Burgess death

Share your thoughts on Anthony Burgess quotes with the community: