Quote

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

Anthony Burgess

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anthony Burgess
Age: 76 †
Born: 1917
Born: February 25
Died: 1993
Died: November 22
Author
Autobiographer
Composer
Dramaturge
Journalist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Novelist
Poet
Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
Clockwork
Imposed
Chosen
Upon
Evil
Better
Good
Men
Dystopia

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
Anthony Burgess
Image
I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
Anthony Burgess
Image
I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.
Anthony Burgess
Image
The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
Anthony Burgess
Image
I was always on my oddy knocky.
Anthony Burgess
Image
John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
Anthony Burgess
Image
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Anthony Burgess
Image
When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess
Image
And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.
Anthony Burgess
Image
The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess
Image
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
Anthony Burgess
Image
laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like the very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva.
Anthony Burgess
Image
I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.
Anthony Burgess
Image
There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
Anthony Burgess