Quotes from Anthony Burgess

English translation of the Koran. I wonder how, with such a repetitive farrago of platitudes, expressing so self-evident a theology and an ethic so puerile, Islam can have spread as it has.

...a victim of bad medicine, bad air, bad food, farcical education, a despicable popular culture.

slang the home-made language of the ruled, not the rulers, the acted upon, the used, the used up. It is demotic poetry emerging in flashes of ironic insight.

Any kind of discourse which has a flavour of the British ruling class, so powerful is ancestral memory, must be strenuously avoided.

It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original - with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.

The great gift of the southern lands to our civilisation is the simple right to sit at an outside cafe table and look at things.

With such exquisite women there is little need for aphrodisiacs....

There is a profound middle-class nostalgia for the days of British protection....

The church stands that it may be battered, but the fists that batter know their own impotence.

Oh, love, love, love - Love on a hilltop high, Love against a cloudless sky, Love where the scene is Painted by a million stars, Love with martinis In the cabarets and bars. Oh, love, love, love...

Well-fed and liquored, I responded with ardour.

a man who sold meat but knew nothing of the poetry of the slaughterhouse. Ted Arden was no ice-cream butcher.

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

When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.

That shut her up real horrorshow and lovely.

What's it going to be then, eh?

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.

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

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. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

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.

We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.

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

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