Anthony Burgess > Quotes

“Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.”
― Anthony Burgess, Homage To Qwert Yuiop: Essays

“Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.”
― Anthony Burgess

“But what I do I do because I like to do.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“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.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Each man kills the thing he loves.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“What's it going to be then, eh?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”
― Anthony Burgess

“It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. 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.”
― Anthony Burgess

“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.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“This must be a real horrorshow film if you're so keen on my viddying it.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.”
― Anthony Burgess

“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.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“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.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“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.”
― Anthony Burgess

“Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions, when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.”
― Anthony Burgess

“Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Well, well, well, well. If it isn't fat, stinking billygoat Billy-Boy in poison. How art thou, thy globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. ”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.”
― Anthony Burgess

“Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!”
― Anthony Burgess

“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.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“... 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 type preaching goloss: '- The attempt to impose upon a 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-”
― Anthony Burgess

“It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.”
― Anthony Burgess

“Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured!
I was cured alright.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“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.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Civilised my syphilised yarbles.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“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

“How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“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.”
― Anthony Burgess

“Go on, do me in, you bastard cowards, I don't want to live anyway, not in a stinking world like this one.' I told Dim to lay off a bit then, because it used to interest me sometimes to slooshy what some of these starry decreps had to say about life and the world. I said: 'Oh. And what's stinking about it?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“What I do I do because I like to do.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“I was always on my oddy knocky.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van. ”
― Anthony Burgess

“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.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“They don't go into what is the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop? If lewdies are good that's because they like it, and I wouldn't ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. And I was patronizing the other shop. More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of the brave malenky selves fighting these big machines?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.”
― Anthony Burgess

“We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.”
― Anthony Burgess

“Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.”
― Anthony Burgess

“How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others”
― Anthony Burgess