Anthony Burgess Quotes
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He forgot that the Malays revere cats and that the Chinese merely relish them.
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Relief brought an aching desire to be sitting in a kedai with a large bottle of Tiger or Anchor or Carlsberg in front of him....
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…for thy huggest thy bolster, which men call a Dutch wife in some parts.
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'The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penological theories....Common criminals...can best be dealt with on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all.'
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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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...To the mother hubbard girl, whose name seemed to be Janie: ‘It becomes you, it does really, that chunk of filthy butter muslin, but then you’re the sort of girl who could get away with anything, even having one tit bigger than the other.’ He did a comic oenophil act with the bottle of Marsovin...
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…of course, keep-fit people are no good in bed…
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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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‘So she was Greek, was she?’ said Sir Benjamin. ‘Well, well. I suppose the new vice laws are driving some of them out of Soho. Driving them down here,’ he said, as though a whole new world were opening up. ‘Well.’
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...he became one with his Chinese parishioners, announcing a trade as honest as that of the dentist, the seller of rice-wine, the brothel-keeper, the purveyor of quack rejuvenators and aphrodisiacs, or the vendor of shark’s-fin strips.
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‘it excites the pancreas to fresh efforts’
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an Australian….They have suffered under the yoke of the English…
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There must always be somebody. However young or insignificant. There has to be somebody who comes from nowhere to say what others are too foolish or too frightened to say.
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...the bathroom which Crabbe visited showed signs that Moneypenny now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory.
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It was all a matter of a Goddess – dark, hidden, deadly, horribly desirable.
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‘I know what is love. Love is man and woman in bed.’
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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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The important thing is to get yourself born. You’re entitled to that. But you’re not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen.
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'…And the rising sun shall rise yet higher, destroying with its flaming fire the evil will of the wicked West, but smiling warmly on the rest'
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…workmen who wanted (a) the white man out…,(c) sinecures