Anthony Burgess Quotes
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He would milk the white man....The white man had more money than sense.
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...with Indians there is an unhealthy love of the law...
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Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally - that was a man’s life.
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I was only the returned Oriental eccentric, drunk at that…
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England become a feeble-lighted Moon of America…
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Well-fed and liquored, I responded with ardour.
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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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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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Around them the gawping locals sat, amazed with an amazement that never grew less…
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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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'It was not seemly to raise your flags on the minarets.'
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'…Just you bloody hypocrites with your four wives and your ten thousand houris in heaven?…'
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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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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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'Easier, lad, with those soft small bodies....Nothing to it. They're just soft squashy things.'
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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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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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… ‘I’ve only one hobby, and that is my wife.’
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It began to worry me that I could never possibly settle in England now, not after Tokyo nude-shows and sliced green chillies, brown children sluicing at the road-pump, the air-conditioned hum in bedrooms big as ballrooms, negligible income-tax, curry tiffins, being the big man in the big car, the bars of all the airports of Africa and the East.
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…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.
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…death came so easily, hardly announced, without apparent cause, often greeted with smiles.