Quotes of Anthony Burgess - somelinesforyou

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

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

“ To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world. ”

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

“ Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose. ”

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

“ People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know. ”

- Anthony Burgess

“ 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

“ You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen. ”

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

“ The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence the act of love, for instance; music, for instance. You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours. ”

- Anthony Burgess

“ Well, everything's a lesson, isn't it? Learning all the time, as you could say. ”

- Anthony Burgess

“ The thrill of theft, of violence, the urge to live easy is it worth it when we have undeniable proof, yes, yes, incontrovertible evidence that hell exists? ”

- Anthony Burgess

“ 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

“ 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

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

- Anthony Burgess

“ 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

“ 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

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

- Anthony Burgess

“ 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. ”

- Anthony Burgess

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

- 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

“ The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang. ”

- Anthony Burgess

“ Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value… ”

- Anthony Burgess

“ John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced. ”

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

“ 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. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract… ”

- Anthony Burgess

“ Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is. ”

- Anthony Burgess

“ If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not. ”

- Anthony Burgess
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