Anthony Burgess

“There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.”

“The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.”

“I'm a natural clown, I suppose, in writing, and one has to accept that; I can't do anything about it. I have written one or two novels which are not specifically funny. I wrote a study of Shakespeare which was not intended to be funny, but some people regard it as such.”

“The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.”

“Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language”

“We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.”

“And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.”

“The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance. You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours.”

“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.”

“You're a romantic,” said Crabbe. “You expect too much. Reality's always dull, you know, but when we see that it's all there is, well-it miraculously ceases to be dull.”

“A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life.”

“Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.”

“The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.”

“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.”

“If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.”

“Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.”

“When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.”

“Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.”

“Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.”

“But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, then the governing machine grows remote, impersonal, even inhuman. It takes money from us for purposes we do not seem to sanction; it treats us as abstract statistics; it controls an army; it supports a police force whose function does not always appear to be protective.”