Top 250 Anthony Burgess Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.”

— Anthony Burgess

Featured in: Culture Quotes

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

— Anthony Burgess

Featured in: Relationship Quotes

3. “It’s always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you’re going.”

— Anthony Burgess

4. “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.”

— Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

6. “Life is, of course, terrible.”

— Anthony Burgess

7. “Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don’t know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.”

— Anthony Burgess

8. “It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.”

— Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

10. “A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show – full of potential but temporarily inactive.”

— Anthony Burgess

11. “Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?”

— Anthony Burgess

12. “Well, well, well, well. If it isn’t fat, stinking billygoat Billy-Boy in poison. How art thou, thy globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou.”

— Anthony Burgess

13. “But what I do I do because I like to do.”

— Anthony Burgess

14. “Goodness comes from within... Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

— Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

16. “I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.”

— Anthony Burgess

17. “I didn’t think; I experimented.”

— Anthony Burgess

18. “Sanity is a handicap and liability if you’re living in a mad world.”

— Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

20. “To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.”

— Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

22. “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?”

— Anthony Burgess

23. “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.”

— Anthony Burgess

24. “Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.”

— Anthony Burgess

25. “Perhaps the ultimate act of evil is dehumanization, the killing of the soul.”

— Anthony Burgess

26. “There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.”

— Anthony Burgess

27. “The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.”

— Anthony Burgess

Featured in: Reading Quotes

28. “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

29. “Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.”

— Anthony Burgess

30. “Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.”

— Anthony Burgess

31. “The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.”

— Anthony Burgess

32. “I was cured all right.”

— Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

34. “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.”

— Anthony Burgess

35. “I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren’t overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.”

— Anthony Burgess

36. “Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.”

— Anthony Burgess

37. “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. And I see that clearly – that business about the marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.”

— Anthony Burgess

38. “If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.”

— Anthony Burgess

39. “Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.”

— Anthony Burgess

40. “Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.”

— Anthony Burgess

41. “All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.”

— Anthony Burgess

42. “All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.”

— Anthony Burgess

43. “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

44. “For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered.”

— Anthony Burgess

45. “Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.”

— Anthony Burgess

46. “As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.”

— Anthony Burgess

47. “Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.”

— Anthony Burgess

48. “Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.”

— Anthony Burgess

49. “This must be a real horrorshow film if you’re so keen on my viddying it.”

— Anthony Burgess

50. “Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God’s. The sixth day is for football.”

— Anthony Burgess