Anthony Burgess Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Love #Life #Relationship

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

#Believe #Doe #Sin

“When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Men #Choices

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

#Design #Culture #Matter

“But what I do I do because I like to do.”
-- Anthony Burgess

“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Writing #Fearless

“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

#Vocabulary #Earth #Flesh

“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

#Art #Boys #Oil

“Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Sex #Writing #Literature

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

#Ghost #Life Is #Holy

“Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Imagination #Records #Language

“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

#Education #Art #Two

“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

#Order #Evil #Choices

“...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Believe #Government #Free Will

“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

#Writing #Character #Facts

“Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Men #Evil #Dystopia

“It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Evil #Inhuman

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

#Believe #Unseen #Christ

“The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Sex #Book #Violence

“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

#Hymns #Where You Come #Celebration

“Life is, of course, terrible.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Life Is #Terrible

“Each man kills the thing he loves.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Broken Heart #Men

“A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Intelligent #Intellectual #Intelligence

“The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Slang #Downtrodden #Creator

“If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Worst #Disappointed #Persons

“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

#Morning #Brother #Real

“And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Brother #Real #Winter

“If I had died it would have been even better for you political bratchnies, would it not, pretending and treacherous droogs as you are.' But all that came out was er er er.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Political #Pretending

“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

#Three #Alex #Evening

“Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.”
-- Anthony Burgess

#Spit