Quotes by Anthony Burgess

“When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”

“In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.”

“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.”

“Dreams go by opposites I was once told.”

“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”

“You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed...”

“The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.”

“But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, then the governing machine grows remote, impersonal, even inhuman. It takes money from us for purposes we do no...”

“Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.”

“I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother.”

“What sort of world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there's not no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more.”

“It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”

“My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and wo...”

“Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable...”

“The heresy of an age of reason,' or some such slovos [words]. 'I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.”

“You're a romantic, said Crabbe. You expect too much. Reality's always dull, you know, but when we see that it's all there is, well-it miraculously ceases to be dull.”

“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.”

“A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.”

“A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small ...”

“They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as ind...”