Quotes from Anthony Burgess

Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness?

There is the devastatingly simple, yet profound, moral dilemma, which underlies the book: is it better for a man to choose to be bad than to be conditioned to be good?

C.S. Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way.

But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, then the governing machine grows remote, impersonal, even inhuman. It takes money from us for purposes we do not seem to sanction; it treats us as abstract statistics; it controls an army; it supports a police force whose function does not always appear to be protective.

Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.

You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God. That sort of thing could sap all the strength and the goodness out of a chelloveck.

The heresy of an age of reason. I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

I must give up seeing people, I told myself.

Ser bueno puede llegar a ser algo horrible.

There's the mackerel of the cornflake for you, you dirty reader of filth and nastiness.

Destruction, best expressed in this age in which I write as terrorism, is truly there for its own sake, but the pretense of religion or secular patriotism converts the destructive into the speciously creative.

My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world...

Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God's. The sixth day is for football

You got used to a bit of peace and you got used to a bit of extra pretty polly.

Because I'm too drunk to feel the pain if you hit me, and if you kill me I'll be glad to be dead.

I see you have books under your arm, brother. It is indeed a rare pleasure these days to come across somebody that still reads, brother.

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.

Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.

Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.

Why are we fighting? We're fighting because we're soldiers. That's simple enough, isn't it? For what cause are we fighting? Simple again. We're fighting to protect our country, and, in a wider sense, the whole of the English-Speaking Union. From whom? No concern of ours. Where? Wherever we're sent. Now, Foxe, I trust all this is perfectly clear.

The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.

Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language

What's this for?' I said. And this veck replied, interrupting his like song an instant, that it was to keep my gulliver still and make me look at the screen. 'But,' I said, 'I want to look at the screen. I've been brought here to viddy films and viddy films I shall.