Top 15 Anthony Burgess Quotes

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

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

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

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

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

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.

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

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

Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.

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

Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.

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.

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.