Anthony Burgess quotes

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone. (Anthony Burgess)
Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
Anthony Burgess
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
Anthony Burgess
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
Anthony Burgess
Every dogma has its day.
Anthony Burgess
If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
Anthony Burgess
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
Anthony Burgess
What's it going to be then, eh?
Anthony Burgess
This must be a real horrorshow film if you're so keen on my viddying it.
Anthony Burgess
It's sapiens to be homo.
Anthony Burgess
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)
Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
Anthony Burgess
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
Anthony Burgess
What I do I do because I like to do.
Anthony Burgess
Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
Anthony Burgess
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
Anthony Burgess
Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.
Anthony Burgess
Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
Anthony Burgess
I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
Anthony Burgess
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)
Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony Burgess
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
...youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.
Anthony Burgess
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