Anthony Burgess Quotes
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…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.
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The dog now slept, occasionally farting very gently.
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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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Him they would not harm, Englishmen being, though infidel, yet the race of past District Officers, judges, doctors, men perhaps, in their time, more helpful than otherwise, powerful but mild.
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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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'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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‘You are admitting, then, to frivolity of attitude to important global problems?’
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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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That night we visited various places where well-shaped and scented, though completely naked, Japanese girls came to sit on male knees.
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‘She is a goddess,’ said Ambrose, drunkenly and stoutly. ‘…And she wants me. She’s the pursuer…She’s the epitome of woman, not,’ he said, ‘not a second-hand bundle of coy erogeneity draped,’ he said, ‘in an all-too-diaphanous robe,’ he said, ‘of pudeur.’
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The Antipods…were always ready to burst.
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'The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.'
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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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…the cold deflation of crapula…
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Outside, the main doors behind him, he was hit full in the chest by autumn. The doggy wind leapt about him and nipped; leaves skirred along the pavement, the scrape of the ferrules of sticks; melancholy, that tetrasyllable, sat on a plinth in the middle of the square. English autumn, and the whistling tiny souls of the dead round the war memorial.
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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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‘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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'...reality’s always dull, you know...'
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Disgusting, ridiculous, when other people did it.
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From ancient drains and sewers of the language (maritime inns and brothels…), from scrawls in the catacombs…whoremasters’ chapbooks…the vocabulary of tavern brawls
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'You mean,' said ‘Che Ramli, 'he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.'
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… ‘I’ve only one hobby, and that is my wife.’
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...an Empire now crashing about their ears. The Sikh smiled at the vanity of human aspirations.