Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

But what I do I do because I like to do.

— Anthony Burgess

“You were not put on this Earth just to get in touch with god”

— Anthony Burgess

When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.

— Anthony Burgess

Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.

— Anthony Burgess

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

— Anthony Burgess

This must be a real horrorshow film if you're so keen on my viddying it.

— Anthony Burgess

Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.

— Anthony Burgess

“Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you enuch jelly, thou”

— Anthony Burgess

laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.

— Anthony Burgess

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

— Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

“The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.”

— Anthony Burgess

Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited…

— Anthony Burgess

Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure…

— Anthony Burgess

If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina.…

— Anthony Burgess

I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because…

— Anthony Burgess

You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly…

— Anthony Burgess

But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the CAUSE of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing…

— Anthony Burgess

Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be…

— Anthony Burgess

We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard.…

— Anthony Burgess

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books…

— Anthony Burgess

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an…

— Anthony Burgess

I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your…

— Anthony Burgess

“My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred…

— Anthony Burgess

“Now in those days, my brothers, the teaming up was mostly by fours and fives, these being like auto-teams, for being a…

— Anthony Burgess

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks…

— Anthony Burgess

“Well well well. What makes, bratty. What gives, this fine bright middle of the nochy?" He said: "I'll give you just ten…

— Anthony Burgess

“One thing I could never stand was to see a filthy dirty old drunky howling away at the filthy songs of his…

— Anthony Burgess

“There she was, welcoming him in, farting prrrrrrp like ten thousand earthquakes, belching arrrp and og like a million volcanoes, while the…

— Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

“Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language”

— Anthony Burgess

“And those hard slovos, brothers, were like the beginning of my freedom.”

— Anthony Burgess

“I am everyone's friend,'I said.'Except to my enemies.”

— Anthony Burgess

“But this one was a writer, not a reader.”

— Anthony Burgess

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

— Anthony Burgess

Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.

— Anthony Burgess

How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.

— Anthony Burgess