Anthony Burgess Quotes
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There was a certain creative excitement, expressed in glandular constrictions which he knew well.
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‘Here we go again,’ he thought. ‘Drink and reminiscence. Another day of wasted time. They’re right when they say we drink too much out here. And we slobber too much over ourselves....We’re all sorry for ourselves because we’re not big executives or artists or happily married men in a civilized temperate climate.’
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'You drink wine, you have foreskins. These things have been observed.'
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‘…you read mostly menus and the moles on whores’ bellies….’
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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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The window opened gently and a still Autumn night entered cat-like. Edwin smelt freedom and London autumn – decay, smoke, cold, motor oil.
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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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I know little about the women of my own race...
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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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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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‘…I prefer to think of young women less as human beings than as pimply parcels of televisual reflexes.’
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'We believe in Allah, we take the Koran as a sacred book. In our land we broke the power of infidel Rum, in his own land we struck down her Sultan whom men called the Pope, in Malta we slew the Knights, sworn enemies of Islam. Inform your people that we are sent by Allah to geld the evil Turk and raise high the people of the Nile.'
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Singapura means lion-city; prehistoric, myopic, Sanskrit-speaking visitors having spotted a mangy tiger or two in the mangroves. Sly Malays sometimes call it Singa pura-pura, which means ‘pretending to be a lion’….It is a profoundly provincial town pretending to be a metropolis.
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...the prophet of harmless solace in a harsh world....
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'Yes yes yes, later. For now I would ask you to proclaim next Friday from the mimbar in the masjid that the French are protectors of the faith and friends of the Prophet.'
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…he had to admit to a faint admiration (faint as angostura colouring gin and water)
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'You mean,' said ‘Che Ramli, 'he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.'
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'Salam aleikum.'
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The West is eveningland, the East morningland.
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I lay a little while, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated, smoking a cigarette that should have been postcoital but was not.
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‘You are admitting, then, to frivolity of attitude to important global problems?’
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'Easier, lad, with those soft small bodies....Nothing to it. They're just soft squashy things.'
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'All right,' said Rowlandson. He began shakily to count out notes. Near-broken, he was still an Englishman; he would not bargain.
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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.'