The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess

I didn’t think I experimented.

Anthony Burgess

The downtrodden who are the great creators of slang hurl pithiness and colour at poverty and oppression.

words, language

Anthony Burgess

Without class differences England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

Anthony Burgess

It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.

Anthony Burgess

I can’t accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.

Anthony Burgess

Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed.

destruction, hate

Anthony Burgess

Minister: As I was saying, Alex, you can be instrumental in changing the public verdict. Do you understand, Alex? Have I made myself clear?Alex: As an unmuddied lake, Fred. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer. You can rely on me, Fred.

clarity, man, mankind, stanley-kubrick

Anthony Burgess

A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.

language, truth

Anthony Burgess

Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.

growing-up, understanding

Anthony Burgess

By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange – meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. 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. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

clockwork-orange, evil, good, moral-compass, morality, morals, sin

Anthony Burgess

Badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.

badness, evil, self, state

Anthony Burgess

To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

create, devastated, easier