Anthony Burgess Quotes
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…death came so easily, hardly announced, without apparent cause, often greeted with smiles.
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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 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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…for thy huggest thy bolster, which men call a Dutch wife in some parts.
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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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'You drink wine, you have foreskins. These things have been observed.'
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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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'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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'…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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Nabby Adams, supine on the bed, grunted. It was four o’clock in the morning and he did not want to be talking. He had had a confused coloured dream about Bombay, shot with sharp pangs of unpaid bills. Over it all had brooded thirst, thirst for a warmish bottle of Tiger beer. Or Anchor. Or Carlsberg. He said, 'Did you bring any beer back with you?'
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…the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold…
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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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There was a certain creative excitement, expressed in glandular constrictions which he knew well.
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'Everything off. I want to see you in your horrific potbellied hairy filthy nakedness.'
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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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…workmen who wanted (a) the white man out…,(c) sinecures
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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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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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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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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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‘…Women I do not much care for myself - I prefer little Greek shepherd-boys…’
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As I walked towards travel, that illusion of liberation, I strangely felt myself walking back into childhood.
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an Australian….They have suffered under the yoke of the English…
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…the whole world here breathed easy concupiscence…