Anthony Burgess Quotes

Have you by chance brought some real British tea? Twining’s? Or from Jackson’s in Piccadilly?

Then I wanted to sick up the gluey pie I'd had before the start of the evening, But I couldn't stand the sort of veshch, sicking all over the floor, so I held it back.

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?

Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil.

I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.

You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good.

But if you eat this chap who's God,' said Llewelyn stoutly, 'how can it be horrible? If it's alright to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?'

'Because,' said Dymphna reasonably, ' if you eat God there's always plenty left. You can't eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can't ever be finished...

"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 the brave malenky selves fighting these big machines?"

nah, that's too serious. How's about:

“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.

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.
My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on until like the end of the world, round and round and round, like some bolshy gigantic like chelloveck, like old Bog Himself (by courtesy of Korova Milkbar) turning and turning and turning a vonny grahzny orange in his gigantic rookers.

What destroys the dream? What destroys it, eh?..........Disappointment. Disappointment. Disappointment.

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

Life to most of us is just a jumble of sensations, like a very bad film with no plot, no real beginning and end.

Pero hermanos, este morderse las uñas acerca de la causa de la maldad es lo que me da verdadera risa. No les preocupa saber cuál es la causa de la bondad, y entonces, ¿por qué quieren averiguar el otro asunto? Si los liudos (individuos) son buenos es porque les gusta, y ni se me ocurriría interferir en sus placeres, así que lo mismo deberían hacer en el otro negocio. Y yo soy cliente del otro negocio.

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

You'd lay there after you'd drunk the old moloko and then you got the messel that everything all around you was sort of in the past.