Anthony Burgess Quotes
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Disgusting, ridiculous, when other people did it.
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…he had to admit to a faint admiration (faint as angostura colouring gin and water)
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…for thy huggest thy bolster, which men call a Dutch wife in some parts.
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'...reality’s always dull, you know...'
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'You mean,' said ‘Che Ramli, 'he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.'
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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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‘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 are admitting, then, to frivolity of attitude to important global problems?’
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...an Empire now crashing about their ears. The Sikh smiled at the vanity of human aspirations.
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'They say the church spire interferes with their bloody television reception.'
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I take my title from the name the Jews have traditionally given the Roman Empire. You may expect to meet all manner of wickedness in what follows - pork-eating, lechery, adultery, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, the most ingenious varieties of cruelty, assassination, the worship of false gods and the sin of being uncircumcised.
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...like a ship, clean and trim on a dirty sea of pox and camel-dung.
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…workmen who wanted (a) the white man out…,(c) sinecures
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I suppose the only real reason for travelling is to learn that all people are the same.
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‘...You know what they call you expatriates? White leeches.’
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Lim Cheng Po, Anglican, Royalist, cricketer, respectable husband and father, allowed his animal reflexes out for an avenue walk on the lead.
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Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.
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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.
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There was no real need...of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till’s guts.
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...even the police discussed this violence as possibly coming within the scope of their terms of reference.
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There he lieth, tossing in the guilt of his lewdness, the primal lecher, neglectful of his duties to a fair wife but all too ready to plunge his sizzling steel into the slaking black mud of a base Indian.
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His real wife, his houri, his paramour was everywhere waiting, genie-like, in a bottle. The hymeneal gouging-off of the bottle-top, the kiss of the brown bitter yeasty flow, the euphoria far beyond the release of detumescence.
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The dog looked up through its hairy yashmak and farted.
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…satyromaniacal…