Quotes from Anthony Burgess

What's on them, I wonder. What would be up there on things like that?' I nudged him hard, saying: 'Come, gloopy bastard as thou art. Think thou not on them. There'll be life like down here most likely, with some getting knifed and others doing the knifing.

You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God.

Everything ends In Mexico Mexico, An excellent place to die. Come some day and try Mexico.

Goodbye, goodbye, may Bog forgive you for a ruined life. Then I got on to the sill, the music blasting away to my left, and I shut my glazzies and felt the cold wind on my listo, then I jumped.

They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly—that business about the marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.

To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.

You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.

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

You'd lay there after you'd drunk the old moloko and then you got the messel that everything all around you was sort of in the past.

Dreams go by opposites I was once told.

Pero hermanos, este morderse las uñas acerca de la causa de la maldad es lo que me da verdadera risa. No les preocupa saber cuál es la causa de la bondad, y entonces, ¿por qué quieren averiguar el otro asunto? Si los liudos (individuos) son buenos es porque les gusta, y ni se me ocurriría interferir en sus placeres, así que lo mismo deberían hacer en el otro negocio. Y yo soy cliente del otro negocio.

One can die but once. Dim died before he was born.

Of course it was horrible,' smiled Dr. Branom. 'Violence is a very horrible thing. That's what you're learning now. Your body is learning it.

The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cured.

Bueno, que me cuelguen si no es ese gordo maloliente, el cabrón Billy y toda la porquería. ¿Cómo estás, botellón de aceite de cocina barato? Acércate, que te daré una en los yarblocos, si es que los tienes, eunuco grasiento.

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

Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver.

the whatness of Allbook.

Well, if they would not go to school they must still have their education. And education they had had.

English is a curiously expressive language. Womb, room, tomb. It sums up living in three words.

Life to most of us is just a jumble of sensations, like a very bad film with no plot, no real beginning and end.

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.

Regional dialects have to become national tongues before they can attain lasting glory. As with America, as with Australia. Scottish is different because Scotland considers itself to be a nation. Its language deserves a chapter to itself.

It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.