Anthony Burgess Quotes
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'Everything off. I want to see you in your horrific potbellied hairy filthy nakedness.'
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...like a ship, clean and trim on a dirty sea of pox and camel-dung.
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'They say the church spire interferes with their bloody television reception.'
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Ah, well, if they wanted their adultery, what did it matter to me? I hadn’t much room to talk, anyway, with my five-pound prostitutes who did a bunk and the Japanese girls who cost far less and didn’t do a bunk and whatever I was likely to pick up in Colombo.
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…the cold deflation of crapula…
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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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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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…Novello should be extremely grateful that his innubile daughter was being taken off his hands by a Tasca.
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‘...You know what they call you expatriates? White leeches.’
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‘They’ll be in all our houses,’ I said, ‘blackies of all colours, before the century’s over. The new world belongs to Asia.
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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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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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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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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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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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The dog looked up through its hairy yashmak and farted.
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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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'How can slaves be sent by Allah? You all have hairless faces, the mark of the bondman.'
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'And now,' Herod calmly said, 'You can kill all the new-born....Kill them all....take your men and let your men take their swords. Make sure they're sharp. To Bethlehem. Hack. Lunge. Chop. Kill.'
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…satyromaniacal…
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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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'...I’m a typical Englishman of my class - a crank idealist.'
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He forgot that the Malays revere cats and that the Chinese merely relish them.