Anthony Burgess Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

• I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.

  Anthony Burgess

  Life, Mean, Thinking

  Anthony Burgess (2013). “One Hand Clapping”, p.91, Profile Books

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• Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.

  Anthony Burgess

  Rome, Cities, Atheism

  1963 Inside Mr Enderby, pt.2, ch.1.

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• The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed.

  Anthony Burgess

  Book, Adults, Relation

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• This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told, 'You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it.

  Anthony Burgess

  Art, Boys, Age

  Televised BBC interview, 1968.

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• I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.

  Anthony Burgess

  Erotic, England, Sisterly

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• I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.

  Anthony Burgess

  Strong, Writing, Littles

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• One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is...There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.

  Anthony Burgess

  Struggle, Writing, Heart

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• You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.

  Anthony Burgess

  Done, Kind, Realizing

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• I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.

  Anthony Burgess

  Goes On, Ends

  Anthony Burgess, Earl G. Ingersoll, Mary C. Ingersoll (2008). “Conversations with Anthony Burgess”, p.51, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

  Anthony Burgess

  Doctors, Physicians, Credit

  Nothing Like the Sun (1964)

  8 Copy quote

• A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.

  Anthony Burgess

  Sex, Book, Boys

  7 Copy quote

• It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.

  Anthony Burgess

  Wine, Orange, Bird

  Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Burgess (1972). “A clockwork orange”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• What's it going to be then, eh?

  Anthony Burgess

  Anthony Burgess (1998). “A Clockwork Orange”, p.6, A&C Black

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• laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.

  Anthony Burgess

  Law, Orange, Creation

  A Clockwork Orange pt. 1, ch. 2 (1962)

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• The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.

  Anthony Burgess

  Love, Marriage, Sex

  "You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess". Book by Anthony Burgess, 1990.

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• I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.

  Anthony Burgess

  Responsibility, Guilt, Way

  4 Copy quote

• It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

  Anthony Burgess

  Book, Writing, Personality

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• It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.

  Anthony Burgess

  Giving, Perfect, Littles

  "Fictional character: Alex". "A Clockwork Orange", www.imdb.com. 1971.

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• And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.

  Anthony Burgess

  Brother, Real, Winter

  Anthony Burgess (2012). “A Clockwork Orange (Restored Text)”, p.23, W. W. Norton & Company

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• How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.

  Anthony Burgess

  Brother, Wicked, Milk

  Anthony Burgess (2013). “A Clockwork Orange: Restored Edition”, p.48, Penguin UK

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• Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.

  Anthony Burgess

  Modern Youth, Down And, Great Music

  Anthony Burgess (2012). “A Clockwork Orange (Restored Text)”, p.48, W. W. Norton & Company

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• If I had died it would have been even better for you political bratchnies, would it not, pretending and treacherous droogs as you are.' But all that came out was er er er.

  Anthony Burgess

  Political, Pretending, Treacherous

  Anthony Burgess (2012). “A Clockwork Orange (Restored Text)”, p.185, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Alex like groweth up, Oh Yes.

  Anthony Burgess

  Alex

  Anthony Burgess (2012). “A Clockwork Orange (Restored Text)”, p.204, W. W. Norton & Company

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• This truth may be handled either sinfully or profitably; sinfully as when it is treated on only to satisfy curiosity, and to keep up a mere barren speculative dispute.... This point of election... is not to be agitated in a verbal and contentious way, but in a saving way, to make us tremble and to set us upon a more diligent and close striving with God in prayer, and all other duties.

  Anthony Burgess

  Prayer, Curiosity, Way

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• I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.

  Anthony Burgess

  Children, Divorce, Elements

  Anthony Burgess (1990). “You've had your time: being the second part of the confessions of Anthony Burgess”, Heinemann Educational Books

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