Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.
Anthony Burgess
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Books
Written
Book
Behinds
Behind
More quotes by Anthony Burgess
The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed.
Anthony Burgess
laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
Anthony Burgess
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
I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.
Anthony Burgess
Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
Anthony Burgess
Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
Anthony Burgess
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.
Anthony Burgess
There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.
Anthony Burgess
A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.
Anthony Burgess
If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.
Anthony Burgess
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
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.
Anthony Burgess
He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
Anthony Burgess
A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
Anthony Burgess
Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?
Anthony Burgess
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?
Anthony Burgess
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
And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. 'You felt ill this afternoon,' he said, 'because you're getting better. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all.
Anthony Burgess
What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.
Anthony Burgess
Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess
