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
An Irish homosexual is a man who prefers women to drink.
--Anthony Burgess
And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.
--Anthony Burgess
Bathe 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
Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.
--Anthony Burgess
Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
--Anthony Burgess
I suppose the only real reason for travelling is to learn that all people are the same.
--Anthony Burgess
If the world is to be improved it must be by the exercise of individual charity.
--Anthony Burgess
If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
--Anthony Burgess
It's sapiens to be homo.
--Anthony Burgess
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
--Anthony Burgess
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
--Anthony Burgess
Literature is recognizable through its capacity to evoke more than it says.
--Anthony Burgess
Men are influenced by big loud empty words, styes which swell the eyelids and impede vision of the truth.
--Anthony Burgess
No matter how poor a writer is, if he has written a book which changes someone's life he has achieved the only sort of success worth having.
--Anthony Burgess
Reality is what I see, not what you see.
--Anthony Burgess
The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
--Anthony Burgess
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
--Anthony Burgess
The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
--Anthony Burgess
The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.
--Anthony Burgess
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
--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
We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
--Anthony Burgess
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
--Anthony Burgess
Writers are not, by nature, respectable: their function is to be subversive.
--Anthony Burgess
Found 25 occurence(s) in 52,537 quotation(s).