Anthony Burgess Quotes

Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.

Of course it was horrible,' smiled Dr. Branom. 'Violence is a very horrible thing. That's what you're learning now. Your body is learning it.

The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.

Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.

Late December, in Bridgwater, Somerset, Western Province, a middle-aged man named Thomas Wharnton, going home from work shortly after midnight, was set upon by youths. These knifed him, stripped him, spitted him, basted him, carved him, served him - all openly and without shame in one of the squares of the town. A hungry crowd clamoured for hunks and slices, kept back - that the King's Peace might not be broken - by munching and dripping greyboys.

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.

I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother.

In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.

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

It stands to reason you've got to have a war. Not because anybody wants it, of course, but because there's an army. An army here and an army there and armies all over the shop. Armies is for wars and wars is for armies. That's only plain common sense.'
'War's finished,' said Tristram. 'War's outlawed. There hasn't been any war for years and years and years.'
'All the more reason why there's got to be a war,' said the driver, 'if we've been such a long time without one.

That's what it's going to be then, brothers, as I come to the like end of this tale. You have been everywhere with your little droog Alex, suffering with him, and you have viddied some of the most grahzny bratchnies old Bog ever made, all on to your old droog Alex. And all it was was that I was young. But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.
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 young earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lipmusic brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that call.

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress.

One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is ... There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it ... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.

Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.

When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.

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.

And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.

Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.

The religious impulse can be very dangerous. It damages, sometimes permanently.

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

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.

I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.

Destruction, best expressed in this age in which I write as terrorism, is truly there for its own sake, but the pretense of religion or secular patriotism converts the destructive into the speciously creative.

Oh bliss, bliss and heaven... Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh... 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 - Alex

It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.

Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.

Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself ... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.

You were not put on this Earth just to get in touch with god

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

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

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.

Because I'm too drunk to feel the pain if you hit me, and if you kill me I'll be glad to be dead.

I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.

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 I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, 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 ...

Everything ends
In Mexico Mexico,
An excellent place to die.
Come some day and try
Mexico.

The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets threewise silverflamed,

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

So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing.

English is a curiously expressive language. Womb, room, tomb. It sums up living in three words.

It's funny how the colours of the like real world only seem real real when you viddy them on a screen

You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly - that business about marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.

Translation is not a matter of words only; it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

Goodbye, goodbye, may Bog forgive you for a ruined life. Then I got on to the sill, the music blasting away to my left, and I shut my glazzies and felt the cold wind on my listo, then I jumped.

When the State withers, humanity flowers.

And then, before he told me, I knew what it was. The old ptitsa who had
all the kots and koshkas had passed on to a better world in one of the city
hospitals. I'd cracked her a bit too hard, like. Well, well, that was
everything. I thought of all those kots and koshkas mewling for moloko and
getting none, not any more from their starry forella of a mistress. That was
everything. I'd done the lot, now and me still only fifteen.

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

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.

You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads to another. Right right right.

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

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.

And I thought to myself, Hell and blast you all, if all you bastards are on the side of Good then I'm glad I belong to the other shop.

But in a sense, destruction is a means of creation. When a vandal knoecks in the side of a telephone booth, or scratches his name on the side of a subway car, he is leaving his mark. He is, whether he knows it or not, attempting to show that he exists and that he has the ability to affect things, and to change things. Destructive violence is a way of saying, 'Look, I am here.' That's the easy way. That's negative creation. Positive creation is much more difficult - it requires patience and talent.

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days, and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither.

Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed.

You'd lay there after you'd drunk the old moloko and then you got the messel that everything all around you was sort of in the past.

Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.

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

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons; pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce; trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.

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.

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

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

Pfffrrrummmp.
And a very happy New Year to you too, Mr Enderby!

You must take your chance boy. The choice has been all yours.

Being young's a sort of sickness,
Measles, mumps or chicken pox.
Gather all your toys together,
Lock them in a wooden box.
That means tolchocks, crasting and dratsing,
All of the things that suit a boy.
When you build instead of busting,
You can start your Ode to Joy.
Do not be a clockwork orange,
Freedom has a lovely voice.
Here is good and there is badness,
Look on both, then take your choice.
Sweet in juice and hue and aroma,
Let's not be changed to fruit machines.
Choice is free but seldom easy-
That's what human freedom means.

Every dogma has its day.

Dreams go by opposites I was once told.

Ah, 6655321, think on the divine suffering. Meditate on that, my boy.' And all the time he had this rich manny von of Scotch on him, and then he went off to his little cantora to peet some more. So I read all about the scourging and the crowning with thorns and then the cross veshch and all that cal, and I viddied better that there was something in it. While the stereo played bits of lovely Bach I closed my glazzies and viddied myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in, being dressed in a like toga that was the heighth of Roman fashion. So being in Staja 84F was not all that wasted, and the Governor himself was very pleased to hear that I had taken to like Religion, and that was where I had my hopes.

But poor old Dim kept looking up at the stars and planets and the Luna with his rot wide open like a kid who'd never viddied any such thing before, and he said: "What's on them, I wonder. What would be up there on things like that?" I nudged him hard, saying: "Come, gloopy bastard as thou art. Think thou not on them. There'll be life like down here most likely, with some getting knifed and others doing the knifing.

I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless ...

Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.

It's a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old like you done, and there's no law nor order no more.

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

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?

Then I looked at its top sheet, and there was the name – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE – and I said: 'That's a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?' Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high preaching goloss: ' - The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen -

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.

What's all this about sin, eh?'
'That,' I said, very sick. 'Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.' And then I was really sick and they had to bring a bowl that was in the shape of like a kidney.
'Music,' said Dr. Brodsky, like musing. 'So you're keen on music. I know nothing about it myself. It's a useful emotional heightener, that's all I know. Well, well. What do you think about that, eh, Branom?'
'It can't be helped,' said Dr. Branom. 'Each man kills the thing he loves ...

So if I get loveted and it's three months in this mesto and another six in that, and then, as P. R. Deltoid so kindly warns, next time, in spite of the great tenderness of my summers, brothers, it's the great unearthly zoo itself, well, I say, 'Fair, but a pity, my lords, because I just cannot bear to be shut in. My endeavour shall be, in such future as stretches out its snowy and lilywhite arms to me before the nozh overtakes or the blood spatters its final chorus in twisted metal and smashed glass on the highroad, to not get loveted again.

You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.

Minister: As I was saying, Alex, you can be instrumental in changing the public verdict. Do you understand, Alex? Have I made myself clear?
Alex: As an unmuddied lake, Fred. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer. You can rely on me, Fred.

Perhaps the ultimate act of evil is dehumanization, the killing of the soul

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.

The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed: that is one of the most abiding of human satisfaction.

Then I wanted to sick up the gluey pie I'd had before the start of the evening, But I couldn't stand the sort of veshch, sicking all over the floor, so I held it back.

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

Regional dialects have to become national tongues before they can attain lasting glory. As with America, as with Australia. Scottish is different because Scotland considers itself to be a nation. Its language deserves a chapter to itself.

I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.

If I had died it would have been even better for you political bratchnies, would it not, pretending and treacherous droogs as you are.' But all that came out was er er er.

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book ... I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

To turn a decent young man into a piece of clockwork should not, surely, be seen as any triumph for any government, save one that boasts of its repressiveness.

But what I do I do because I like to do.

This truth may be handled either sinfully or profitably; sinfully as when it is treated on only to satisfy curiosity, and to keep up a mere barren speculative dispute ... This point of election ... is not to be agitated in a verbal and contentious way, but in a saving way, to make us tremble and to set us upon a more diligent and close striving with God in prayer, and all other duties.

The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cured.

A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life.

I am instructed by the Home Secretary to read out the following. . . . It is a prayer devised by the Ministry of Propaganda. . . . 'It is conceivable that the forces of death which at present are ravaging the esculent life of this planet have intelligence, in which case we beseech them to leave off. It we have done wrong--allowing in our blindness natural impulse to overcome reason--we are, of course, heartily sorry. But we submit that we have already suffered sufficiently for this wrong and we firmly resolve never to sin again. Amen.

Reviewers do not read books with much care ... their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.