“Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“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 (1917-1993)
“But what I do I do because I like to do.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions, when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“Bedways is rightways now, so best we go homeways.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“When the State withers, humanity flowers.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“English is a curiously expressive language. Womb, room, tomb. It sums up living in three words.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God's. The sixth day is for football”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
“Life to most of us is just a jumble of sensations, like a very bad film with no plot, no real beginning and end.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
”Sanity is a handicap and liability if you’re living in a mad world.”
― Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)