Quotes by Anthony Burgess

About Anthony Burgess:

John Anthony Burgess Wilson was an English writer and composer. From relatively modest beginnings in a Catholic family in Manchester, he eventually became one of the best known English literary figures of the latter half of the twentieth century.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Anthony Burgess

What's all this about sin, eh?' 'That,' I said, very sick. 'Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.' And then I was really sick and they had to bring a bowl that was in the shape of like a kidney. 'Music,' sa...

Anthony Burgess

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.

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 ste...

Anthony Burgess

And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get the hit than give it. If that veck had stayed I might even have like presented the other cheek.

Anthony Burgess

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

Anthony Burgess

Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and...

Anthony Burgess

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.

Anthony Burgess

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 frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrat...

Anthony Burgess

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

Anthony Burgess

I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.

Anthony Burgess

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

Anthony Burgess

I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.

Anthony Burgess

It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.

Anthony Burgess

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

Anthony Burgess

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

Anthony Burgess

Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.

Anthony Burgess

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

Anthony Burgess

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

Anthony Burgess

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

Anthony Burgess

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Anthony Burgess

Author Bio

  • NameAnthony Burgess
  • DescriptionEnglish writer
  • AliasesJohn Anthony Burgess Wilson
  • BornFebruary 25, 1917
  • DiedNovember 22, 1993
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Journalist; Translator; Screenwriter; Poet; Composer; Novelist
  • AwardsPrometheus Award - Hall Of Fame