Quotes by Burgess, Anthony




Anthony Burgess (February 25, 1917 - November 22, 1993) was an English novelist and critic. He was also active as a composer, librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator and educationalist. Born John Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England, he lived and worked variously in Southeast Asia, the United States and Mediterranean Europe. His fiction includes the Malayan trilogy (The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of Britain's empire in the East, the Enderby cycle of comic novels about a reclusive poet and his muse, the classic speculative recreation of Shakespeare's love-life Nothing Like the Sun, the cult exploration of the nature of evil A Clockwork Orange, and Earthly Powers, a panoramic Tolstoyan saga of the 20th century. He wrote critical studies of Joyce, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Lawrence, produced the treatises on linguistics Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air, and turned out large quantities of journalism in several languages. The translator and adapter of Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen for the stage, he scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen and composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. 3) in C and the opera Blooms of Dublin..

"Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy."

Burgess, Anthony on delinquency    Share


"If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not."

Burgess, Anthony on fiction
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"Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace."

Burgess, Anthony on hygiene    Share

"The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang."

Burgess, Anthony on language    Share

"Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it."

Burgess, Anthony on art    Share

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

Burgess, Anthony on money
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"All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else."

Burgess, Anthony on catholicism    Share

"We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization."

Burgess, Anthony on violence    Share

"The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels."

Burgess, Anthony on writers and writing    Share

"Een romanschrijver mag niet te intelligent zijn... maar misschien is het toegelaten dat hij een intellectueel is."

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"Lezers in overvloed, denkers zijn zeldzaam."

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"Het bezitten van een boek wordt een excuus om het te lezen."

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"Schrijven is gedesinteresseerd worden. Er is een zekere afzwering in kunst."

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"Geweld onder jongeren is een aspect van hun verlangen om te creëren. Ze weten niet hoe ze hun energie creatief kunnen aanwenden dus doen ze het tegenovergestelde en vernietigen ze."

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