Anthony Burgess Quotes

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

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.

- Anthony Burgess

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.

- Anthony Burgess

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.

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

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.

- Anthony Burgess

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

- Anthony Burgess

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

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.

- Anthony Burgess

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

- Anthony Burgess

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.

- Anthony Burgess

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.

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

Every dogma has its day.

- Anthony Burgess

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

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

- Anthony Burgess

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

- Anthony Burgess

It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.

- Anthony Burgess

I didn't think; I experimented.

- Anthony Burgess