Quotes from Anthony Burgess

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

I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in.

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

I'm a natural clown, I suppose, in writing, and one has to accept that; I can't do anything about it. I have written one or two novels which are not specifically funny. I wrote a study of Shakespeare which was not intended to be funny, but some people regard it as such.

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.

When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.

The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.

I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.

I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.

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.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.

It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.

...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.

When the State withers, humanity flowers.

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

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.

I didn't think; I experimented.

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

Life is, of course, terrible.

The writer's life seethes within but not without.

Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.