Anthony Burgess Quotes

“A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.”

“A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show ? full of potential but temporarily inactive.”

“Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.”

“Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions, when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.”

“Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.”

“Every dogma has its day.”

“I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.”

“I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.”

“I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.”

“I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.”

“Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.”

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

“I didn't think; I experimented.”

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

“Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language.”

“A human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange.”

“A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life.”

“Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”

“Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.”

“Goodness comes from within. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

“I am everyone?s friend. Except to my enemies.”

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

“When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea.”

“Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.”

“You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God.”

“Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?”

“I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless.”

“We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.”

“When the State withers, humanity flowers.”

“When we pray we admit defeat.”