Top 250 Anthony Burgess Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.”

— Anthony Burgess

202. “Let us have evil prancing on the page and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the inherited beliefs, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Holy Roller, about people being able to make themselves better. Such a book would be sensational, and so it is. But I do not think it is a fair picture of human life. I.”

— Anthony Burgess

203. “What’s done can’t be undone. How do I fit into this new world? I should have been warned, somebody should have told me. How was I to know that that sort of world wasn’t going to go on for ever?”

— Anthony Burgess

204. “If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilised discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.”

— Anthony Burgess

205. “Dreams go by opposites I was once told.”

— Anthony Burgess

206. “A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life.”

— Anthony Burgess

207. “Then there was another picture of some veck I thought I knew, and it was this Minister of the Inferior or Interior.”

— Anthony Burgess

208. “So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing.”

— Anthony Burgess

209. “When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.”

— Anthony Burgess

210. “Oh, I’m dying,′ I like moaned. ‘Oh, I have a ghastly pain in my side. Appendicitis, it is. Ooooooh.’ ‘Appendy shitehouse,’ grumbled this veck.”

— Anthony Burgess

211. “You must take your chance boy. The choice has been all yours.”

— Anthony Burgess

212. “We are always ready to look down on people: it is an abiding pleasure, a poultice for our own sore sense of inferiority.”

— Anthony Burgess

213. “You’d lay there after you’d drunk the old moloko and then you got the messel that everything all around you was sort of in the past.”

— Anthony Burgess

214. “I must give up seeing people, I told myself.”

— Anthony Burgess

215. “Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness?”

— Anthony Burgess

216. “Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil.”

— Anthony Burgess

217. “History is a wheel. This sort of world can’t go on for ever either.”

— Anthony Burgess

218. “Why are we fighting? We’re fighting because we’re soldiers. That’s simple enough, isn’t it? For what cause are we fighting? Simple again. We’re fighting to protect our country, and, in a wider sense, the whole of the English-Speaking Union. From whom? No concern of ours. Where? Wherever we’re sent. Now, Foxe, I trust all this is perfectly clear.”

— Anthony Burgess

219. “Connection was the thing, whether through bed, bottle, grand inquisitorial session.”

— Anthony Burgess

220. “One’s first memories are often vicarious: one is told that one did something or was involved in something; one dramatizes it and folds the image falsely into the annals of the truly remembered.”

— Anthony Burgess

221. “They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and were all bruised and pouty. Well, if they would not go to school they must have there education. And education they had had.”

— Anthony Burgess

222. “The intellectuals have never been on the side of the workers. Sometimes they’ve let on to be, but only for purposes of betrayal.”

— Anthony Burgess

223. “When we’re healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea.”

— Anthony Burgess

224. “The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.”

— Anthony Burgess

225. “Reason and faith, the Archbishop said, do not of necessity cohere. Reason saith that water will not be transformed to wine. Faith has a contrary answer.”

— Anthony Burgess

226. “The heresy of an age of reason. I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.”

— Anthony Burgess

227. “What’s this for?’ I said. And this veck replied, interrupting his like song an instant, that it was to keep my gulliver still and make me look at the screen. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I want to look at the screen. I’ve been brought here to viddy films and viddy films I shall.”

— Anthony Burgess

228. “But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, then the governing machine grows remote, impersonal, even inhuman. It takes money from us for purposes we do not seem to sanction; it treats us as abstract statistics; it controls an army; it supports a police force whose function does not always appear to be protective.”

— Anthony Burgess

229. “Then we slooshied.”

— Anthony Burgess

230. “I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother.”

— Anthony Burgess

231. “Regional dialects have to become national tongues before they can attain lasting glory. As with America, as with Australia. Scottish is different because Scotland considers itself to be a nation. Its language deserves a chapter to itself.”

— Anthony Burgess

232. “Shined, combed, brushed and gorgeous.”

— Anthony Burgess

233. “The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed: that is one of the most abiding of human satisfaction.”

— Anthony Burgess

234. “What gives, O my little sister? Come thou and have a nice lay-down with your malenky droog in this bed.”

— Anthony Burgess

235. “And so I hunger for something that is permanent, something that will last forever. Truth, I am told, is a thing that will last forever.”

— Anthony Burgess

236. “Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.”

— Anthony Burgess

237. “Late December, in Bridgwater, Somerset, Western Province, a middle-aged man named Thomas Wharnton, going home from work shortly after midnight, was set upon by youths. These knifed him, stripped him, spitted him, basted him, carved him, served him – all openly and without shame in one of the squares of the town. A hungry crowd clamoured for hunks and slices, kept back – that the King’s Peace might not be broken – by munching and dripping greyboys.”

— Anthony Burgess

238. “Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Where I see the infamy I seek to erase it. Party names mean nothing. The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded-.”

— Anthony Burgess

239. “A human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange.”

— Anthony Burgess

240. “Besame los yarblocos”- El lerdo.”

— Anthony Burgess

241. “Well, sir, it has come through on the pipes that a consignment of cocaine has arrived by irregular means and that a cell somewhere along Tier 5 is to be the centre of distribution.’ I made all that up as I went along, like I made up so many of these stories, but the prison charlie was very grateful, saying: ‘Good, good, good. I shall pass that on to Himself,’ this being what he called the Governor.”

— Anthony Burgess

242. “It was like as though to get better I had had to get worse.”

— Anthony Burgess

243. “So I was put into the bed and still felt bolnoy but could not sleep, but soon I started to feel that soon I might start to feel that I might soon start feeling just a malenky bit better.”

— Anthony Burgess

244. “Will not the Government itself now decide what is and what is not crime and pump out the life and guts and will of whoever sees fit to displeasure the Government?”

— Anthony Burgess

245. “If the author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea and the Nick Adams stories had been an undersized weed, asthmatic or phthisic, living out strong-man fantasies in the literature he produced, he would still be one of the great American writers.”

— Anthony Burgess

246. “But what was the matter with me these days was that I didn’t like care much. It was like something soft getting into me and I could not pony why. What I wanted these days I did not know.”

— Anthony Burgess

247. “Leave him alone, you grahzny bratchny,” and then he began the old whine about how nobody loved him.”

— Anthony Burgess

248. “I viddied this sloppy glass of beer I had on the table in front of me and felt like all vomity within, so I went ‘Aaaaah’ and poured all the frothy vonny cal all over the floor. One of the starry ptitsas said: ‘Waste not want not.’ I said:.”

— Anthony Burgess

249. “All we know is that men move, men change, and that the sufferings they undergo – and will themselves to undergo – are both wrong and right.”

— Anthony Burgess

250. “But you could viddy a like gleam in his glazzies, because now he would be taking over for this nochy. Power power, everybody like wants power.”

— Anthony Burgess