Anthony Burgess Quotes
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It's sapiens to be homo.
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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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He would milk the white man....The white man had more money than sense.
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Edwin, so much himself a sham, felt a sort of kinship with the sham pleasures of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street as they travelled painfully towards Soho.
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Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally - that was a man’s life.
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'It was not seemly to raise your flags on the minarets.'
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…my two chronic diseases of gluttony and satyriasis…
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Around them the gawping locals sat, amazed with an amazement that never grew less…
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England become a feeble-lighted Moon of America…
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'…Just you bloody hypocrites with your four wives and your ten thousand houris in heaven?…'
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Well-fed and liquored, I responded with ardour.
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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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…all heroes and heroines trying to approximate, through barriers of pigmentation, to the Hebraico-Caucasian norm of Hollywood
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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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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 Malay word chium meant to plough the beloved’s face with one’s nose
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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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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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‘…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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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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…jumped-up commercials pretending, too late, to be the ruling class..
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There was a certain creative excitement, expressed in glandular constrictions which he knew well.
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Now we were the very good malchicks, smiling good evensong to one and all, though these wrinkled old lighters started to get all shook, their veiny old rookers all trembling round their glasses, and making the suds spill on the table. 'Leave us be, lads,' said one of them, her face all mappy with being a thousand years old, 'we’re only poor old women.'