Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Anthony Burgess (English Novelist, Critic)

Anthony Burgess (1917–93,) pseudonym of John Anthony Burgess Wilson, also called Joseph Kell, was an English novelist, critic, and composer. His 33 novels, two autobiographies, and a large amount of journalism addressed many of the critical issues of his time, including censorship, multiculturalism, individual freedom, and sexual liberation.

Born in Manchester, Burgess served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War II. After the war, he taught in England before becoming an education officer 1954–59 in Malaya and Brunei as part of the colonial service. His experiences there inspired The Malayan Trilogy (1956–59,) consisting of The Long Day Wanes: Time for a Tiger (1956,) The Enemy in the Blanket (1958,) and Beds in the East (1959.)

Back in England, Burgess became a full-time and prolific professional writer. Among his many novels is A Clockwork Orange (1962; film 1971,) a disturbing, futuristic vision of juvenile delinquency, violence, and high technology. Other notable works include Earthly Powers (1980,) The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985,) Any Old Iron (1989,) and A Dead Man in Deptford (1993.)

Burgess also wrote works of literary criticism, biographies, children’s books, and libretti. His two-volume autobiography is Little Wilson and Big God (1987,) and You’ve Had Your Time (1990.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by 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
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?

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