Anthony Burgess Quotes
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…satyromaniacal…
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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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Rosemary was only a spinster in the strict sense of denotation. She was eminently, eminently nubile.
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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 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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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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...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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‘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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'...I’m a typical Englishman of my class - a crank idealist.'
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…workmen who wanted (a) the white man out…,(c) sinecures
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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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‘it excites the pancreas to fresh efforts’
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...the bathroom which Crabbe visited showed signs that Moneypenny now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory.
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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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‘I know what is love. Love is man and woman in bed.’
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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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…of course, keep-fit people are no good in bed…
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It was all a matter of a Goddess – dark, hidden, deadly, horribly desirable.
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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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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.