Anthony Burgess

“It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”

“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.”

“He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.”

“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”

“Dreams go by opposites I was once told.”

“Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.”

“I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in.”

“We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.”

“Every dogma has its day.”

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

“Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.”

“Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.”

“The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.”

“When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea.”

“Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.”

“You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads to another. Right right right.”

“There was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the way I could see it.”

“A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.”

“You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God.”

“You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen.”