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
Topics: Language
Readers of the twenty-first chapter must decide for themselves whether it enhances the book they presumably know or is really a discardable limb. I meant the book to end in this way, but my aesthetic judgment may have been faulty. Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics. ‘Quod scripsi scripsi’ said Pontius Pilate when he made Jesus Christ the King of the Jews. ‘What I have written I have Written.’ We can destroy what we have written but we cannot unwrite it. I leave what I wrote with what Dr. Johnson called frigid indifference to the judgment of that .00000001 of the American population which cares about such things. Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
—Anthony Burgess
Topics: Authors & Writing
For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
—Anthony Burgess
Topics: The Artist
We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
—Anthony Burgess
Topics: Money
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
—Anthony Burgess
Topics: Reading
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
—Anthony Burgess
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
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
Topics: Violence
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
—Anthony Burgess
Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
—Anthony Burgess
Topics: Fashion
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
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.
—Anthony Burgess
Topics: Language
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. 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
Topics: Books, Reading
All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
—Anthony Burgess
Topics: Religion
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
Topics: Violence
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Douglas Adams British Author
- Raymond Chandler American Novelist
- Peter Ustinov British Actor, Playwright
- Neil Gaiman British Writer
- Kingsley Amis English Novelist, Poet
- George Orwell English Novelist, Essayist, Journalist
- Maurice Baring British Author
- Jerome K. Jerome English Humorist, Novelist
- Christopher Hitchens Anglo-American Social Critic
- Leigh Hunt British Author
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