Quotes from Anthony Burgess

Bedways is rightways now, so best we go homeways.

When the State withers, humanity flowers.

Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

We were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.

It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going

Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.

It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist's innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance. You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours.

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

The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others

When we pray we admit defeat.

It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.

Me, me, me. How about me? Where do I come into all this? Am I like just some animal or dog? Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?

Go on, do me in, you bastard cowards, I don't want to live anyway, not in a stinking world like this one.' I told Dim to lay off a bit then, because it used to interest me sometimes to slooshy what some of these starry decreps had to say about life and the world. I said: 'Oh. And what's stinking about it?

Life is, of course, terrible.

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- A Clockwork Orange Resucked intro to first full American version 1986

People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.

Well, everything's a lesson, isn't it? Learning all the time, as you could say.

And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.

The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded.

It may not be nice to be good, 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?