Anthony Burgess Quotes
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Imams and muftis and kathis sat here on cushions, turbaned elders who had risen above the squalor of the flesh. The heat was tamed by wide-eyed boys with feathery fans. One of the muftis much admired one of these boys, and he stroked his buttocks with a gentle hand. The smell of the holy was wafted towards entering Bonaparte, who said with care:
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Vorpal had the trick of adding a Malay enclitic to his utterances. This also had power to irritate, especially in the mornings. It irritated Nabby Adams that this should irritate him, but somewhere at the back of his brain was the contempt of the man learned in languages for the silly show-off, jingling the small change of ‘wallah’ and charpoy...
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Sultan Aladdin… had few illusions about his own people: amiable, well-favoured, courteous, they loved rest better than industry… their function was to remind the toiling Chinese, Indians and British of the ultimate vanity of labour.
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…jumped-up commercials pretending, too late, to be the ruling class..
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It's sapiens to be homo.
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Her face was that of a boy gang-leader, smooth with the innocence of one who, by the same quirk as blinds a man to the mystery of whistling or riding a bicycle, has never mastered the art of affection or compassion or properly learned the moral dichotomy.
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...with Indians there is an unhealthy love of the law...
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…all heroes and heroines trying to approximate, through barriers of pigmentation, to the Hebraico-Caucasian norm of Hollywood
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Rosemary’s reputation was known; he would, by obscure logic, become retrospectively a cuckold.
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There were…smiles of encouragement for Lydgate, and some smiles of sweet pity as well, as for the only leper present.
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‘…Your little feuilleton…recording…my crude nabob’s philistinism…’
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‘But you like her, don’t you?’ asked Howarth. ‘You like Mrs Connor?’ For himself, thought Howarth, he did not particularly like Mrs Connor. He desired Mrs Connor, however.
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…British louts with guitars and emetic little songs…infantile screamers…
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Lydgate opened the sort of letter…'My dear husband I very good…I come in flying ship…we be very happy…love.' It was as satisfactory a letter as he had ever received from a woman.
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They could hardly believe it, the retreating arses of all that Mameluke or Turkish cavalry, heathen anyway, crying heathen words as they cantered off in gunsnioke and dust-clouds, dropping spears and jewels and good Birmingham pistols. And soon it was water water water, a world of blessed water, the muddy stinking welcoming mother Nile near Rahmaniya.
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‘…The senior Mr Denham’s,’ he said, with deadly Eastern realism, ‘will perhaps only be better in the grave.
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…surely that sneered-at suburban life was more stable than this shadow life…in a country where no involvement was possible…better than the sordid dalliance that soothed me after work?
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…the whole world here breathed easy concupiscence…
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'As for your circumcisions, the chief modin can arrange all. Your wine must return to the earth, whence the grape came. Haram.'
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‘…Women I do not much care for myself - I prefer little Greek shepherd-boys…’
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Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally - that was a man’s life.
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'…as the cinema shows us, they are much more accessible and, for that matter, much more wanton than our own women'
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Grimaldi and a sixteen-year-old girl still at Hollywood High. He was a good journalist but he was going to die soon. At fifty he was on a bottle and a half of Californian brandy a day and four packs of Lucky Strike. His clothes smelt as though they were seeped in tobacco juice. His white forlock was stained with it...
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'We're in control, and we have what we want!'