01UndatedI like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
02UndatedWhat sort of world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there's not no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
03UndatedIt's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
04UndatedMy son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world...Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
05UndatedSelf-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
06UndatedThe heresy of an age of reason,' or some such slovos [words]. 'I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
07UndatedYou're a romantic,” said Crabbe. “You expect too much. Reality's always dull, you know, but when we see that it's all there is, well-it miraculously ceases to be dull.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
08UndatedA perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
09UndatedThey were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and were all bruised and pouty. Well, if they would not go to school they must have there education. And education they had had.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
10UndatedThere is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
11UndatedYou've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly - that business about marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
12UndatedA work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
15UndatedThere was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the way I could see it.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
18UndatedBadness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
19UndatedBy definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. 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 or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. 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. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
20UndatedFeeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
21UndatedA man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
22UndatedMinister: As I was saying, Alex, you can be instrumental in changing the public verdict. Do you understand, Alex? Have I made myself clear?Alex: As an unmuddied lake, Fred. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer. You can rely on me, Fred.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
23UndatedThen there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
24UndatedI can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.Anthony Burgess / quote ↗
