Anthony Burgess quotes

Born
25 February 1917, Harpurhey, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom.

Died
22 November 1993.

Occupation
Writer, composer.

Anthony Burgess was an English novelist, playwright, and critic. He began his career as a teacher and a writer of musicals and plays. Burgess is best known for his 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, which was later adapted into a film (A Clockwork Orange (1971) directed by Stanley Kubrick. The novel, an exploration of free will and morality, became a classic of modern literature.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
– Anthony Burgess

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
– Anthony Burgess

Sanity is a handicap and liability if you’re living in a mad world.
– Anthony Burgess

Death comes along like a gas bill one can’t pay.
– Anthony Burgess

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.
– Anthony Burgess

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
– Anthony Burgess

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

Fumbling for a word is everybody’s birthright.
– Anthony Burgess

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

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

He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
– Anthony Burgess

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs.
– Anthony Burgess

…We’re a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
– Anthony Burgess

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

Every dogma has its day.
– Anthony Burgess

If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
– Anthony Burgess

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

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
– Anthony Burgess

Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
– Anthony Burgess

When I first began to write fiction, I didn’t think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.
– Anthony Burgess

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.
– Anthony Burgess

I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.
– Anthony Burgess