Earthly Powers Quotes

“In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“But don’t think that it’s a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It’s our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it’s cold outside. But it’s not the cold’s fault that it’s cold.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“Have you by chance brought some real British tea? Twining’s? Or from Jackson’s in Piccadilly?”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“I must give up seeing people, I told myself.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“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.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“The religious impulse can be very dangerous. It damages, sometimes permanently.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“...I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless...”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“In other words, I heard life going on, and it was a comfort.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“All we know is that men move, men change, and that the sufferings they undergo—and will themselves to undergo—are both wrong and right.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers