Anthony Burgess
I didn't think; I experimented.Collection: Experience
One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.Collection: Age
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.Collection: Alone
I'm a natural clown, I suppose, in writing, and one has to accept that; I can't do anything about it. I have written one or two novels which are not specifically funny. I wrote a study of Shakespeare which was not intended to be funny, but some people regard it as such.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Good
Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.Collection: Men
We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.Collection: Money
Every dogma has its day.Collection: Funny
If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
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.
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
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.
The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.
When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.
The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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 possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in.
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.
I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.
Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.
Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.Collection: Mad
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.Collection: Solitude
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.Collection: Order
I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.Collection: Human Nature
Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.Collection: Imagination
If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.Collection: Worst
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.Collection: Design
Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.Collection: Art
Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.Collection: Art
The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.Collection: Sex
...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.Collection: Believe
We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.Collection: Funny
If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.Collection: Orange
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.Collection: Art
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?Collection: Men
The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.Collection: Want
When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.Collection: Men
Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.Collection: Birthright
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.Collection: Writing
Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.Collection: Order
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.Collection: Evil
I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.Collection: Children
Alex like groweth up, Oh Yes.Collection: Alex
And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.Collection: Brother
laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.Collection: Law