Top 250 Anthony Burgess Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Alex like groweth up, Oh Yes.”

— Anthony Burgess

102. “Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.”

— Anthony Burgess

103. “Fumbling for a word is everybody’s birthright.”

— Anthony Burgess

104. “Every dogma has its day.”

— Anthony Burgess

105. “Of course it was horrible,′ smiled Dr. Branom. ‘Violence is a very horrible thing. That’s what you’re learning now. Your body is learning it.”

— Anthony Burgess

106. “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

107. “The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Greatness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

— Anthony Burgess

108. “Me, me, me. How about me? Where do I come into all this? Am I like just some animal or dog?’ And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: ‘Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?”

— Anthony Burgess

109. “The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cured.”

— Anthony Burgess

110. “Then I looked at its top sheet, and there was the name – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE – and I said: ‘That’s a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?’ Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high preaching goloss: ‘ – 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 swordpen –.”

— Anthony Burgess

111. “If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.”

— Anthony Burgess

112. “Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.”

— Anthony Burgess

113. “The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.”

— Anthony Burgess

114. “Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.”

— Anthony Burgess

115. “Death comes along like a gas bill one can’t pay.”

— Anthony Burgess

116. “The essence of pop stardom is immaturity – a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.”

— Anthony Burgess

117. “Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?”

— Anthony Burgess

118. “Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.”

— Anthony Burgess

119. “The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.”

— Anthony Burgess

120. “All novels are experimental.”

— Anthony Burgess

121. “Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.”

— Anthony Burgess

122. “Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.”

— Anthony Burgess

123. “A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.”

— Anthony Burgess

124. “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

125. “A Clockwork Orange is too didactic to be artistic. It is not the novelist’s job to preach; it is his job to show.”

— Anthony Burgess

126. “The writer’s life seethes within but not without.”

— Anthony Burgess

127. “The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence – the act of love, for instance; music, for instance. You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours.”

— Anthony Burgess

128. “You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen.”

— Anthony Burgess

129. “You don’t say, ‘I’ve done it!’ You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.”

— Anthony Burgess

130. “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

131. “There is the devastatingly simple, yet profound, moral dilemma, which underlies the book: is it better for a man to choose to be bad than to be conditioned to be good?”

— Anthony Burgess

132. “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.”

— Anthony Burgess

133. “The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.”

— Anthony Burgess

134. “The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed.”

— Anthony Burgess

135. “The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penelogical theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens, You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.”

— Anthony Burgess

136. “I’ve always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.”

— Anthony Burgess

137. “Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.”

— Anthony Burgess

138. “What sort of world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there’s not no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more.”

— Anthony Burgess

139. “That’s the law, son. But you were never much of a one for following the law.”

— Anthony Burgess

140. “I see you have books under your arm, brother. It is indeed a rare pleasure these days to come across somebody that still reads, brother.”

— Anthony Burgess

141. “There was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the way I could see it.”

— Anthony Burgess

142. “Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.”

— Anthony Burgess

143. “Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.”

— Anthony Burgess

144. “Life’s only choosing when to die. Life’s a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It’s a tremendous relief not to have to choose.”

— Anthony Burgess

145. “Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.”

— Anthony Burgess

146. “And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.”

— Anthony Burgess

147. “Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.”

— Anthony Burgess

148. “A flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.”

— Anthony Burgess

149. “It was very cally and vonny, with one bulb in the ceiling with fly-dirt like obscuring its bit of light, and there were early rabbiters slurping away at chai and horrible-looking sausages and slices of kleb which they like wolfed, going wolf wolf wolf and then creeching for more.”

— Anthony Burgess

150. “The thrill of theft, of violence, the urge to live easy – is it worth it when we have undeniable proof, yes, yes, incontrovertible evidence that hell exists?”

— Anthony Burgess