Anthony Burgess Quotes

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

Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

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.

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.

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.

If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.

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.

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

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

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.

...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

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?

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.

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

All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.

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

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.

Every dogma has its day.

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

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.