Anthony Burgess Quotes

All that the Malays can do is run the police force and the army.... They are not fitted even to the lowlier mechanical skills, such as car maintenance. They are essentially a people who have been pulled out of the kampongs into the towns, and the town in Malaysia seems essentially a Chinese creation....

The consciousness in [Australia and New Zealand] of the elevation of a substandard dialect into a national tongue has been responsible for a mixture of attitudes to citizens of the mother country - inferiority, defiance, contempt. A blending of the first two may be responsible for the upward intonation pattern of answers, more appropriate to questions….slang is of its nature defiant. It is also demotic….But the ruling class of Australia is itself demotic.

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

...can be read as an ‘answer’ to…Mailer’s The White Negro (1957) and other works of that period recommending crime and ... murder as expressions of existential freedom. ...Mailer recommended that whites emulate ... traits that ... were producing ... the black 'underclass'. In A Clockwork Orange, the young thugs are scarcely existential heroes. The surrounding society does not provide the norms which, internalized, allow for civilization. In the underclass foreseen in A Clockwork Orange, Mr Mailer’s sentimental dream has become our own nightmare.

"And now," Herod calmly said, "You can kill all the new-born....Kill them all....take your men and let your men take their swords. Make sure they're sharp. To Bethlehem. Hack. Lunge. Chop. Kill."

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.

Is this really true? If we take an average day in the life of the average man we seem to see very little evidence of concern with the sciences and the arts. The average man gets up, goes to work, eats his meals, reads the newspapers, watches television, goes to the cinema, goes to bed, sleeps, wakes up, starts all over again. Unless we happen to be professional scientists, laboratory experiments and formulae have ceased to have any meaning for most of us; unless we happen to be poets or painters or musicians—or teachers of literature, painting, and music—the arts seem to us to be only the concern of schoolchildren. And yet people have said, and people still say, that the great glories of our civilisation are the scientists and artists. Ancient Greece is remembered because of mathematicians like Euclid and Pythagoras, because of poets like Homer and dramatists like Sophocles. In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.

So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing.

"But poor old Dim kept looking up at the stars and planets and the Luna with his rot wide open like a kid who'd never viddied any such thing before, and he said: "What's on them, I wonder. What would be up there on things like that?" I nudged him hard, saying: "Come, gloopy bastard as thou art. Think thou not on them. There'll be life like down here most likely, with some getting knifed and others doing the knifing.

it excites the pancreas to fresh efforts

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 brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you, brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.

Oh, era suntuoso, y la suntuosidad hecha carne. Los trombones crujían como láminas de oro bajo mi cama, y detrás de mi golová las trompetas lanzaban lenguas de plata, y al lado de la puerta los timbales me asaltaban las tripas y brotaban otra vez como un trueno de caramelo. Oh, era una maravilla de maravillas. Y entonces, como un ave de hilos entretejidos del más raro metal celeste, o un vino de plata que flotaba en una nave del espacio, perdida toda gravedad, llegó el solo de violín imponiéndose a las otras cuerdas, y alzó como una jaula de seda alrededor de mi cama. Aquí entraron la flauta y el oboe, como gusanos platinados, en el espeso tejido de plata y oro. Yo volaba poseído por mi propio éxtasis, oh hermanos.

Yes yes yes, there it was. Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

[D]elightful, comic, linguistically playful...an opening step in the extraordinarily rich, inventive and experimental career that was to come.

‘So she was Greek, was she?’ said Sir Benjamin. ‘Well, well. I suppose the new vice laws are driving some of them out of Soho. Driving them down here,’ he said, as though a whole new world were opening up. ‘Well.’