Anthony Burgess Quotes

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

...Daudet differs from the hate-filled Baudelaire and Maupassant in being gentle to fellow-sufferers from the disease of life. Syphilis in him did not engender misanthropy.

I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

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

…I prefer to think of [young women] less as human beings than as pimply parcels of televisual reflexes.

It began to worry me that I could never possibly settle in England now, not after Tokyo nude-shows and sliced green chillies, brown children sluicing at the road-pump, the air-conditioned hum in bedrooms big as ballrooms, negligible income-tax, curry tiffins, being the big man in the big car, the bars of all the airports of Africa and the East.

And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get the hit than give it. If that veck had stayed I might even have like presented the other cheek.

There is a profound middle-class nostalgia for the days of British protection....

Somerset Maugham refers more than once to the pleasure of the Malayan morning - papaya and eggs and bacon and strong British tea taken while the air is cool and the sun awaits its sudden thrust into the green land....

Civilised my syphilised yarbles.

‘But you like her, don’t you?’ asked Howarth. ‘You like Mrs Connor?’ For himself, thought Howarth, he did not particularly like Mrs Connor. He desired Mrs Connor, however.

One can die but once. Dim died before he was born.

Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

…surely that sneered-at suburban life was more stable than this shadow life…in a country where no involvement was possible…better than the sordid dalliance that soothed me after work?

[H]ighly ambitious work...continuing power....vast novel...told over eighty-one chapters by an eighty-one-year-old pederast Catholic writer-narrator...summed up the literary, social and moral history of the century with comic richness as well as encyclopedic knowingness.