Quotes from Anthony Burgess

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

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 downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang, hurl pithiness and colour at poverty and oppression.

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.

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

...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.

For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered.

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.

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

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.

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

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

All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

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.

I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

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

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