110+ Anthony Burgess Quotes On A Clockwork Orange, Innovative And Satirical

Anthony Burgess was an English novelist, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. He is best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, which was adapted into a highly controversial film of the same name. He wrote 33 novels, 25 works of non-fiction, two volumes of autobiography, three symphonies, and more than 250 other musical works. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Anthony Burgess on a clockwork orange, innovative, satirical.

Top 10 Anthony Burgess Quotes

1. Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
2. We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
3. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
4. Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
5. 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?
6. To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
7. The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.
8. Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
9. Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
10. Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

Anthony Burgess Short Quotes

• Each man kills the thing he loves.
• It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
• Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
• Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
• Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
• The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
• I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
• I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
• Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.
• For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

Anthony Burgess Quotes About A Clockwork Orange

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

It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. — Anthony Burgess

Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange? — Anthony Burgess

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

Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit? — Anthony Burgess

If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil. — Anthony Burgess

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. — Anthony Burgess

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- "A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986 — Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess Quotes About Living

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

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. — Anthony Burgess

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is. — Anthony Burgess

The essence of pop stardom is immaturity - a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse. — Anthony Burgess

I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning. — Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess Quotes About Violence

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive. — Anthony Burgess

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy. — Anthony Burgess

We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization. — Anthony Burgess

Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance. — Anthony Burgess

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not. — Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess Quotes About Writing

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

I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing. — Anthony Burgess

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist. — Anthony Burgess

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex. — Anthony Burgess

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels. — Anthony Burgess

I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me. — Anthony Burgess

The writer's life seethes within but not without. — Anthony Burgess

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. — 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 the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal. — Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess Quotes About Life

The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science. — Anthony Burgess

Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. — Anthony Burgess

All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else. — Anthony Burgess

As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused. — Anthony Burgess

Life is, of course, terrible. — Anthony Burgess

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

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. — Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess Famous Quotes And Sayings

Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice. — Anthony Burgess

Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers? — Anthony Burgess

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. — Anthony Burgess

If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered. — Anthony Burgess

The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. — Anthony Burgess

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. — 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

It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van. — Anthony Burgess

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth. — Anthony Burgess

Well, well, well, well. If it isn't fat, stinking billygoat Billy-Boy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou. — Anthony Burgess

I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid. — Anthony Burgess

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

Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare. — 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 wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured! — Anthony Burgess

Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book. — Anthony Burgess

As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God; though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties. — Anthony Burgess

The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world. — Anthony Burgess

Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever. — Anthony Burgess

In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive. — 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 malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of GOODNESS, so why of the other shop? — Anthony Burgess

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 boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible. — Anthony Burgess

For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered. — Anthony Burgess

This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told, 'You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it. — Anthony Burgess

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees. — Anthony Burgess

And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. 'You felt ill this afternoon,' he said, 'because you're getting better. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all. — Anthony Burgess

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000. — Anthony Burgess

Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it. — Anthony Burgess

Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination. — Anthony Burgess

But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure. — Anthony Burgess

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

Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles. — Anthony Burgess

Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. — Anthony Burgess

John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced. — Anthony Burgess

The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons; pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce; trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once. — Anthony Burgess

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. — Anthony Burgess

As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse. — Anthony Burgess

Civilised my syphilised yarbles. — Anthony Burgess

A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's supposed to be doing. — Anthony Burgess

Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free. — Anthony Burgess

If you expect the worst from a person, you can't ever be disappointed... The pessimist takes a sort of gloomy pleasure in observing the depths to which human behaviour can sink. The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed; that is one of the most abiding of human satisfaction. — Anthony Burgess

And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight. — Anthony Burgess

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

When the State withers, humanity flowers. — Anthony Burgess

All novels are experimental. — Anthony Burgess

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

I didn't think; I experimented. — Anthony Burgess

The English language is being augmented every year by about 400 new words. We cannot cope. We are drowning in the plethora. It — Anthony Burgess

If I had died it would have been even better for you political bratchnies, would it not, pretending and treacherous droogs as you are.' But all that came out was er er er. — Anthony Burgess

...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man. — Anthony Burgess

But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there. ... And all that cal. — Anthony Burgess

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

You have no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It's like having a totally efficient contraceptive. — Anthony Burgess

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist. — Anthony Burgess

We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet. — Anthony Burgess

When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man. — 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 that I have read. — Anthony Burgess

Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like the very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva. — Anthony Burgess

Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual. — Anthony Burgess

Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. — Anthony Burgess

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

To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create. — Anthony Burgess

I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation. — Anthony Burgess

This truth may be handled either sinfully or profitably; sinfully as when it is treated on only to satisfy curiosity, and to keep up a mere barren speculative dispute.... This point of election... is not to be agitated in a verbal and contentious way, but in a saving way, to make us tremble and to set us upon a more diligent and close striving with God in prayer, and all other duties. — Anthony Burgess

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

You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do. — Anthony Burgess

Life Lessons by Anthony Burgess

1. Anthony Burgess taught us to never give up on our dreams and to always strive for greatness, no matter how difficult the journey may be.
2. He also showed us that creativity and imagination can take us to places we never thought possible and that it is important to never stop learning and exploring.
3. Finally, Burgess taught us that life is short and we should make the most of it by living with passion and enthusiasm.