Anthony Burgess Quotes

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Anthony Burgess

Profession : Novelist

Birth : February 25, 1917

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

Anthony Burgess

Every dogma has its day.

Anthony Burgess

I didn't think; I experimented.

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

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

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

Anthony Burgess

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

Anthony Burgess

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

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

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

Anthony Burgess

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

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

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

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

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

Anthony Burgess

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

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

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

Anthony Burgess

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

Anthony Burgess