99 Selected Quotes By Anthony Burgess, The Author Of A Clockwork Orange
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, better known by his pen name Anthony Burgess, was an author and music composer from England, who is often counted among the greatest writers to have come out of the country in the last hundred years. Other than being a novelist, Burgess was a noted comic writer, broadcaster, essayist, critic, playwright and screenwriter that made him one of the famous individuals in England during his lifetime. Burgess’ most famous work is the novel ‘A Clockwork Orange’ that was later made into a hugely popular film by director Stanley Kubrick, in 1971. He was also a well-known translator and had translated ‘Oedipus the King’ and ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ among others. As a literary critic, he worked for ‘The Guardian’ and was regarded as an authoritative voice in the world of literature due to his standing as a leading novelist. Burgess, however, considered himself to be a music composer first and author second. During his life, he had composed in excess of 200 tunes and his work was quite well received at the time. Burgess is, however, immortalised because of his novels and remains an iconic figure to this day. Here are some of the selected quotes
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
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.
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
But what I do I do because I like to do.
I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.
What's it going to be then, eh?
It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
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?
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
This must be a real horrorshow film if you're so keen on my viddying it.
Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.
Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.
Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions, when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.
Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
I was always on my oddy knocky.
We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
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.
What I do I do because I like to do.
Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.
I was cured all right.
Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.
