Quotes from Anthony Burgess

Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.

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.

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

Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

Men are influenced by big loud empty words, styes which swell the eyelids and impede vision of the truth.

If the world is to be improved it must be by the exercise of individual charity.

If you reject family - which a mother holds together - as well as the ties of Church and State, is there anything left for you?

Singapura means lion-city; prehistoric, myopic, Sanskrit-speaking visitors having spotted a mangy tiger or two in the mangroves. Sly Malays sometimes call it Singa pura-pura, which means pretending to be a lion.It is a profoundly provincial town pretending to be a metropolis.

Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community.

Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned. The questioning of linguistic conventions is one of the main duties of what we call literature.

Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.

Writers are not, by nature, respectable: their function is to be subversive.

[Graham Greenes] ability to encapsulate the essence of an exotic setting in a single book is exemplified in The Heart of the Matter (1948); his contemporary Evelyn Waugh stated that the West Africa of that book replaced the true remembered West Africa of his own experience.

The West is eveningland, the East morningland.

It was all a matter of a Goddess dark, hidden, deadly, horribly desirable.

My darling one....I shall be thinking of you while you are away and hope you will remember to wrap up warm when you go out at night.

I suppose the only real reason for travelling is to learn that all people are the same.

Howarth began to see that, however much it was against ones will and convictions, sides had to be taken, the dreary corrupt world of politics had to be entered by the good and dispassionate, to protect and avenge the weak. But one always entered too late.

Love seems inevitable, necessary, as normal and as easy a process as respiration.

As I walked towards travel, that illusion of liberation, I strangely felt myself walking back into childhood.

I know little about the women of my own race...

And the rising sun shall rise yet higher, destroying with its flaming fire the evil will of the wicked West, but smiling warmly on the rest.

Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally - that was a mans life.