Anthony Burgess Quotes

You must take your chance boy. The choice has been all yours.

Him they would not harm, Englishmen being, though infidel, yet the race of past District Officers, judges, doctors, men perhaps, in their time, more helpful than otherwise, powerful but mild.

...in the Restoration period, feeling and imagination were mistrusted: feeling implied strong convictions, and strong convictions had produced a Civil War and the harsh rule of the Commonwealth; imagination suggested the mad, the wild, the uncouth, the fanatical. It was best to live a calm civilised life governed by reason. Such a life is best lived in the town, and the town is the true centre of culture; the country estates are impoverished, and little of interest is going on there; the country itself is barbaric.

It's funny how the colours of the like real world only seem real real when you viddy them on a screen

It’s a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old like you done, and there’s no law nor order no more.

God, say some philosophers, manifests himself in the sublunary world in particular beauties, truths and acts of benevolence; properly, the values should be conjoined to shadow their identity in the godhead, but this happens so infrequently that one must suppose divinity condones a kind of diabolic fracture or else, and perhaps my book is already giving some hint of this, he demonstrates his ineffable freedom through contriving at times a wanton inconsistency. If this is so, we need not wonder at Messalina’s failure to match her beauty with a love of truth and goodness. She was a chronic liar and she was thoroughly bad. But her beauty, we are told, was a miracle. The symmetry of her body obeyed all the golden rules of the mystical architects, her skin was without even the most minuscule flaw and it glowed as though gold had been inlaid behind translucent ivory, her breasts were full and yet pertly disdained earth’s pull, the nipples nearly always erect, and visibly so beneath her byssinos, as in a state of perpetual sexual excitation, the areolas delicately pigmented to a kind of russet. The sight of her weaving bare white arms was enough, it is said, to make a man grit his teeth with desire to be encircled by them; the smooth plain of her back, tapering to slenderness only to expand lusciously to the opulence of her perfect buttocks, demanded unending caresses.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

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

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.

Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness?

Well before James Joyce, Conrad was forging a vocabulary for the contemporary soul. This book grants us another opportunity to brood over a notable literary martyrdom. [review in the London Independent newspaper of Joseph Conrad: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers]

Civilised my syphilised yarbles.

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.

"Then I noticed, in all my pain and sickness,what music it was that like crackled and boomed on the
sound-track, and it was Ludwig van, the last movement of the
Fifth Symphony, and I creeched like bezoomny at that. "Stop!"
I creeched. "Stop, you grahzny disgusting sods. It's a sin, that's
what it is, a filthy unforgivable sin, you bratchnies!

Edwin, so much himself a sham, felt a sort of kinship with the sham pleasures of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street as they travelled painfully towards Soho.