Top 250 Anthony Burgess Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “One can die but once. Dim died before he was born.”

— Anthony Burgess

152. “What’s on them, I wonder. What would be up there on things like that?’ I nudged him hard, saying: ‘Come, gloopy bastard as thou art. Think thou not on them. There’ll be life like down here most likely, with some getting knifed and others doing the knifing.”

— Anthony Burgess

153. “A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he’s supposed to be doing.”

— Anthony Burgess

154. “Never,′ I said. ‘One can die but once. Dim died before he was born. That red red krovvy will soon stop.”

— Anthony Burgess

155. “Civilized my syphilised yarbles. Music always sort of sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me like feel like old Bog himself, ready to make with the old donner and blitzen and have vecks and ptitsas creeching away in my ha ha power.”

— Anthony Burgess

156. “And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good.”

— Anthony Burgess

157. “I kept pushing the old noga through the floorboards near, and the Durango 95 ate up the road like spaghetti.”

— Anthony Burgess

158. “Their hair belonged to some middle crinal zone between aseptic nord and latinindian jetwalled lousehouse.”

— Anthony Burgess

159. “You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads to another. Right right right.”

— Anthony Burgess

160. “Horrorshow is right, friend. A real show of horrors.”

— Anthony Burgess

161. “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.”

— Anthony Burgess

162. “The religious impulse can be very dangerous. It damages, sometimes permanently.”

— Anthony Burgess

163. “Violence makes violence.”

— Anthony Burgess

164. “The human liver, unless it is Graham Greene’s, can take so much and no more.”

— Anthony Burgess

165. “That was everything. I’d done the lot now. And me still only fifteen.”

— Anthony Burgess

166. “It’ll be your own torture,” he said, serious. “I hope to God it’ll torture you to madness.”

— Anthony Burgess

167. “You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn’t care.”

— Anthony Burgess

168. “Life to most of us is just a jumble of sensations, like a very bad film with no plot, no real beginning and end.”

— Anthony Burgess

169. “Because I’m too drunk to feel the pain if you hit me, and if you kill me I’ll be glad to be dead.”

— Anthony Burgess

170. “Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed.”

— Anthony Burgess

171. “He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.”

— Anthony Burgess

172. “Our subject is, you see, impelled towards the good by, paradoxically, being impelled towards evil. The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress. To counter these the subject has to switch to a diametrically opposed attitude.”

— Anthony Burgess

173. “For the serious artist does not satisfy needs.”

— Anthony Burgess

174. “And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.”

— Anthony Burgess

175. “If all you bastards are on the side of God then I’m glad I belong to the other shop.”

— Anthony Burgess

176. “Me, me, me. How about me? Where do I come into all this? Am I like just some animal or dog? Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?”

— Anthony Burgess

177. “Power power, everybody like wants power.”

— Anthony Burgess

178. “The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.”

— Anthony Burgess

179. “Go on, do me in, you bastard cowards, I don’t want to live anyway, not in a stinking world like this one.′ I told Dim to lay off a bit then, because it used to interest me sometimes to slooshy what some of these starry decreps had to say about life and the world. I said: ‘Oh. And what’s stinking about it?”

— Anthony Burgess

180. “I wanted music very bad this evening, that singing devotchka in the Korova having perhaps started me off. I wanted like a big feast of it before getting my passport stamped, my brothers, at sleep’s frontier and the stripy shest lifted to let me through.”

— Anthony Burgess

181. “Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory.”

— Anthony Burgess

182. “But 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. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you, brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.”

— Anthony Burgess

183. “We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.”

— Anthony Burgess

184. “Have you by chance brought some real British tea? Twining’s? Or from Jackson’s in Piccadilly?”

— Anthony Burgess

185. “The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress.”

— Anthony Burgess

186. “With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.”

— Anthony Burgess

187. “Is the man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”

— Anthony Burgess

188. “Was war, then, the big solution after all? Were those crude early theorists right? War the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenaline, the solvent of ennui, Angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? War itself a massive sexual act, culminating in a detumescence which was not mere metaphorical dying? War, finally, the controller, the trimmer and excisor, the justifier of fertility?”

— Anthony Burgess

189. “You got used to a bit of peace and you got used to a bit of extra pretty polly.”

— Anthony Burgess

190. “It is not the novelist’s job to preach; it is his duty to show.”

— Anthony Burgess

191. “You were not put on this Earth just to get in touch with god.”

— Anthony Burgess

192. “Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver.”

— Anthony Burgess

193. “It may not be nice to be good, 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”

— Anthony Burgess

194. “Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.”

— Anthony Burgess

195. “I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.”

— Anthony Burgess

196. “Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.”

— Anthony Burgess

197. “The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.”

— Anthony Burgess

198. “But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.”

— Anthony Burgess

199. “The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.”

— Anthony Burgess

200. “Choice,’ rumbled a rich deep goloss. I viddied it belonged to the prison charlie. ‘He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.”

— Anthony Burgess