Anthony Burgess Quotes
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…jumped-up commercials pretending, too late, to be the ruling class..
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The Turks would do anything with a captured screaming infidel body - make it chew its own penis, thrust the testicles up the anus, saw the noseless earless head off with slow delicacy.
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…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.
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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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…death came so easily, hardly announced, without apparent cause, often greeted with smiles.
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… ‘I’ve only one hobby, and that is my wife.’
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'Brutality!' cried Tristam. The class was at last interested. 'Beatings-up. Secret police. Torture in brightly lighted cellars. Condemnation without trial. Finger-nails pulled out with pincers. The rack. The cold-water treatment. The gouging out of eyes. The firing squad in the cold dawn. And all this because of disappointment. The Interphase.'
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‘What you could do with is a nice strong cup of tea, sir. I’ll tell the kuki to make you one.’ ‘Does it really do any good, Nabby? (That was better.) ‘I’ve tried every damn thing.’....
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…the whole world here breathed easy concupiscence…
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'…My name…is Mahalingam….is Sanskrit for ‘large or great or mighty generative organ’ - this, of course, having more a religious (through associations of religion and fertility) significance than an anatomical one. Though anatomically and…socially the name has not proved inept.
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'You drink wine, you have foreskins. These things have been observed.'
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After all, what bit of money I’ve made has been made among mosquitoes and sand-flies, snakes in the bedroom, long monotonous damp heat, boredom, exasperation with native clerks. Who are these sweet stay-at-homes, sweet well-contents, to try and suck it out of me and feel aggrieved if they can’t have it?
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'We're in control, and we have what we want!'
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…the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold…
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Mr Raj had been purely Orientally and fancifully complimentary (‘So great a man, his lingam as long and thick as a tree, the father of whole villages’).
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'Salam aleikum.'
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I watched the grey villages limp by, the wind tearing at torn posters of long-done events. What I needed, of course, was a drink.
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'My darling one....I shall be thinking of you while you are away and hope you will remember to wrap up warm when you go out at night.'
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I know little about the women of my own race...
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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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Ted, I noted, was very busy - at the pumps, at the glasses behind, the bottles below, the merrily ringing till, like a percussion-player in some modern work who dashes with confidence from xylophone to glockenspiel to triangle to wind-machine to big drum to tambourine.
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an Australian….They have suffered under the yoke of the English…
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Mr Liversedge...saw the whole ridiculous Oriental susah in true proportion. Here men would murder for five dollars, here men would seek divorce because their wives sighed at the handsomeness of the film star P.Ramlee....nodding at the lucid exposition of Mr Lim from Penang, though contemning inwardly the Pommie accent...
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‘…Women I do not much care for myself - I prefer little Greek shepherd-boys…’