Anthony Burgess Quotes
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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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'Everything off. I want to see you in your horrific potbellied hairy filthy nakedness.'
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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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Disgusting, ridiculous, when other people did it.
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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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'...reality’s always dull, you know...'
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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 Malay word chium meant to plough the beloved’s face with one’s nose
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Now we were the very good malchicks, smiling good evensong to one and all, though these wrinkled old lighters started to get all shook, their veiny old rookers all trembling round their glasses, and making the suds spill on the table. 'Leave us be, lads,' said one of them, her face all mappy with being a thousand years old, 'we’re only poor old women.'
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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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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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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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'They say the church spire interferes with their bloody television reception.'
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…the cold deflation of crapula…
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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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…the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold…
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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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The dog now slept, occasionally farting very gently.
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She sank again into the salty water...into the delicious warm brine-tasting depths of her grief.
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…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.
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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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Howarth began to see that, however much it was against one’s will and convictions, sides had to be taken, the dreary corrupt world of politics had to be entered by the good and dispassionate, to protect and avenge the weak. But one always entered too late.