Quotes by Anthony Burgess

“Oh? And what's so stinking about it?.”

“Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language”

“Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the f...”

“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.”

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

“There was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the way I could see it.”

“Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the t...”

“It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.”

“The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.”

“A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.”

“You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.”

“You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen.”

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

“The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress.”

“And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.”

“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.”

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

“And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good.”

“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?”

“You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads to another. Right right right.”