382 Quotes by Anthony Burgess

The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Greatness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver.

I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren’t overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.

I kept pushing the old noga through the floorboards near, and the Durango 95 ate up the road like spaghetti.

A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he’s supposed to be doing.

Civilized my syphilised yarbles. Music always sort of sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me like feel like old Bog himself, ready to make with the old donner and blitzen and have vecks and ptitsas creeching away in my ha ha power.

The religious impulse can be very dangerous. It damages, sometimes permanently.

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.

Was war, then, the big solution after all? Were those crude early theorists right? War the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenaline, the solvent of ennui, Angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? War itself a massive sexual act, culminating in a detumescence which was not mere metaphorical dying? War, finally, the controller, the trimmer and excisor, the justifier of fertility?