Top 250 Anthony Burgess Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.”

— Anthony Burgess

52. “Each man kills the thing he loves.”

— Anthony Burgess

53. “Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.”

— Anthony Burgess

54. “Civilised my syphilised yarbles.”

— Anthony Burgess

55. “Speak up for me, sir, for I’m not so bad. I was led on by the treachery of others.”

— Anthony Burgess

56. “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

57. “How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.”

— Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

59. “Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence – the act of love, for instance; music, for instance.”

— Anthony Burgess

60. “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.”

— Anthony Burgess

61. “I was always on my oddy knocky.”

— Anthony Burgess

62. “There’s the mackerel of the cornflake for you, you dirty reader of filth and nastiness.”

— Anthony Burgess

63. “A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.”

— Anthony Burgess

64. “Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.”

— Anthony Burgess

65. “There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.”

— Anthony Burgess

66. “In a dead white field an untethered goat gave them sardonic greeting.”

— Anthony Burgess

67. “Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.”

— Anthony Burgess

68. “In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.”

— Anthony Burgess

69. “The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.”

— Anthony Burgess

70. “What’s it going to be then, eh?”

— Anthony Burgess

71. “How art thou, thou 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

72. “You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God. That sort of thing could sap all the strength and the goodness out of a chelloveck.”

— Anthony Burgess

73. “Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.”

— Anthony Burgess

74. “Well, everything’s a lesson, isn’t it? Learning all the time, as you could say.”

— Anthony Burgess

75. “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.”

— Anthony Burgess

76. “But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the CAUSE of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don’t go into what is the cause of GOODNESS, so why of the other shop?”

— Anthony Burgess

77. “Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.”

— Anthony Burgess

78. “Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like the very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva.”

— Anthony Burgess

79. “The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.”

— Anthony Burgess

80. “He said it was artificial respiration but now I find I’m to have his child.”

— Anthony Burgess

81. “I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.”

— Anthony Burgess

82. “Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you enuch jelly, thou.”

— Anthony Burgess

83. “You have no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It’s like having a totally efficient contraceptive.”

— Anthony Burgess

84. “As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.”

— Anthony Burgess

85. “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

86. “And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.”

— Anthony Burgess

87. “And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. ‘You felt ill this afternoon,’ he said, ’because you’re getting better. When we’re healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You’re becoming healthy, that’s all.”

— Anthony Burgess

88. “Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination.”

— Anthony Burgess

89. “Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”

— Anthony Burgess

90. “Hitler was a teetotalitarian.”

— Anthony Burgess

91. “I am everyone’s friend,’ I said. ‘Except to my enemies.”

— Anthony Burgess

92. “I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.”

— Anthony Burgess

93. “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

94. “To turn a decent young man into a piece of clockwork should not, surely, be seen as any triumph for any government, save one that boasts of its repressiveness.”

— Anthony Burgess

95. “The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. – – “A Clockwork Orange Resucked” intro to first full American version 1986.”

— Anthony Burgess

96. “I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.”

— Anthony Burgess

97. “The next morning I woke up at oh eight oh oh hours, my brothers, and as I still felt shagged and fagged and fashed and bashed and my glazzies were stuck together real horrorshow with sleepglue, I thought I would not go to school.”

— Anthony Burgess

98. “When the State withers, humanity flowers.”

— Anthony Burgess

99. “The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.”

— Anthony Burgess

100. “As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God; though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties.”

— Anthony Burgess