Anthony Burgess

The writer’s life seethes within but not without.

The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.

As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.

With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.

Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.

The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.

What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.

Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God’s. The sixth day is for football.

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

I must say that acting was good training for the political life that lay ahead of us.

When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

A clockwork orange.

People don’t like using dictionaries when they’re reading mere novels.

One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is. But one pushes on because one has to pay bills.

It is important that a novel be approached with some urgency. Spend too long on it, or have great gaps between writing sessions, and the unity of the work tends to be lost.

American writers drink when they are “blocked” and drunkenness—being a kind of substitute for art—makes the block worse.

A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he’s supposed to be doing.