Quotes by Anthony Burgess
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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.
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.
Every dogma has its day.
It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
I didn't think; I experimented.
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.
He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.
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.
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.
When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.
I must say that acting was good training for the political life that lay ahead of us.
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
If a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
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 judgement 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 judgement of that .00000001 of the American population which cares about such things. Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
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.
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