Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, FRSL – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English writer and composer. From relatively modest beginnings in a Catholic family in Manchester, he eventually became one of the best known English literary figures of the latter half of the twentieth century...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 February 1917
Anthony Burgess quotes about
ignorance world poverty
Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
blessed bird tree
Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.
strong writing littles
I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.
witty simple italian
Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination.
done kind realizing
You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.
mad world sanity
Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
abiding behaviour likes
If you expect the worst from a person, you can't ever be disappointed... The pessimist takes a sort of gloomy pleasure in observing the depths to which human behaviour can sink. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed; that is one of the most abiding of human satisfaction.
suicidal essence musical
The essence of pop stardom is immaturity - a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.
struggle writing heart
One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is...There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.
journey fiction should
A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
brother laughing biting
But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the CAUSE of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of GOODNESS, so why of the other shop?
divorce america looks
The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch.
critics
Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.
class-differences theatre england
Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.