An eye for an eye, I say. If someone hits you you hit back, do you not? Why then should not the State, very severely hit by you brutal hooligans, not… - Anthony Burgess

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Engraved portrait of Anthony Burgess

An eye for an eye, I say. If someone hits you you hit back, do you not? Why then should not the State, very severely hit by you brutal hooligans, not hit back also? But the new view is to say no. The new view is that we turn the bad into the good. All of which seems to me grossly unjust.

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About Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess (25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993) was an English writer and composer whose novels include the Malayan trilogy, A Clockwork Orange, the Enderby cycle, Nothing Like The Sun, Earthly Powers and The Kingdom Of The Wicked. He also produced critical works on Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway and Shakespeare, and studies of language and of pornography.

Biography information from Wikiquote · Portrait adapted from Wikimedia Commons, Open Media Ltd. (CC BY-SA)

Also Known As

Pen Names: Джозеф Келл Энтони Пауэл Энтони Джилверн
Birth Name: John Anthony Burgess Wilson
Alternative Names: John Burgess Wilson Joseph Kell

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Additional quotes by Anthony Burgess

We can no longer expect the one big book, the single achievement, to be an author's claim to posterity's regard. We shall be more inclined to assess the stature of a novelist by his ability to create what the French call an oeuvre, to present fragments of an individual vision in book after book, to build, if not a War and Peace or Ulysses, at least a shelf.

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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....

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