Anthony Burgess Quotes (61 Quotes)


    Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.

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

    There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory.






    I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.





    A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.

    It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be go?d. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321.

    And then, a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now... I knew such lovely pictures.

    It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist's innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.



    As we walked along the flatblock marina, I was calm on the outside, but thinking all the time - Now it was to be Georgie the general, saying what we should do and what not to do, and Dim as his mindless greeding bulldog. But suddenly, I viddied that thinking was for the gloopy ones, and that the oomny ones use like, inspiration and what Bog sends. Now it was lovely music that came into my aid. There was a window open with the stereo on, and I viddied right at once what to do.

    Now in those days, my brothers, the teaming up was mostly by fours and fives, these being like auto-teams, for being a comfy number for an auto, and six being the outside limit for gang-size. Sometimes gangs would gang up so as to make like malenky armies for big nightwar, but mostly it was best to roam in these like small numbers.



    But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there. ... And all that cal.

    Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like the very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva.


    One thing I could never stand was to see a filthy dirty old drunky howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blurp blurp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts;I could never stand to see anyone like that. whatever his age might be, but more especially when he was real old like this one was.

    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?


    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.


    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.

    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.


    Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly.


    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.

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


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

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

    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.

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


    Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

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

    The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

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

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

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

    We are supposed to be the children of Seth but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.


    More Anthony Burgess Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Books - Brothers - Violence - World - Life - Work & Career - Nature - Birds - Happiness - Literature - Morality - Good & Evil - Youth - Thought & Thinking - Pain - Business & Commerce - Jesus Christ - War & Peace - Money & Wealth - View All Anthony Burgess Quotations

    More Anthony Burgess Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - A Clockwork Orange

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    Ernest Hemingway - V. S. Naipaul - Thomas Hardy - Salman Rushdie - Richard Bach - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Boris Pasternak - Anne Rice - Anne Bronte - Alexander Dumas


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