Anthony Burgess Quotes

"One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going."

"I didn't think; I experimented."

"Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets."

"He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child."

"Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone."

"Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through."

"Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace."

"The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it."

"The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon."

"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."

"A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual."

"The downtrodden are the great creators of slang."

"Every dogma has its day."

"Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare."

"The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

"Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy."

"We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation."

"Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual."

"We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization."

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