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
novelist permitted
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although. . . he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
creators great
The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.
modern-youth down-and great-music
Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.
alex
Alex like groweth up, Oh Yes.
kissing profound lips
And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.
civilised
Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
doctors credit guessing
Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
orange evil lovely
If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.
somewhere-else ghost life-is
All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
vocabulary earth flesh
There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.
imagination records language
Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
two modern kenneth
John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
blessed bird tree
Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.
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.