The best Quotes by Anthony Burgess

John Anthony Burgess Wilson, FRSL, who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer and composer. Although Burgess was predominantly a comic writer, his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange remains his best-known novel.

The best Book Quotes

When we pray we admit defeat.

PrayingAnthony Burgess in The Wanting Seed
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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.

Anthony Burgess in The Wanting Seed
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We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

GovernmentsAnthony Burgess in The Wanting Seed
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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

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

Anthony Burgess
 
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A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a p-rnographic 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.

MasturbationAnthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange
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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.

Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange
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It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.

Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange
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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange
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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.

Decisions, Morality & EthicsAnthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange
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When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

DecisionsAnthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange
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We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange
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Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange
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