Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, FRSL – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English writer and composer. From relatively modest beginnings in a Catholic family in Manchester, he eventually became one of the best known English literary figures of the latter half of the twentieth century...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 February 1917
design culture matter
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
life-and-love dogma
Every dogma has its day.
writing fearless clockwork
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
life real color
It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
sex writing fiction
If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.
order evil choices
The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
evil clockwork inhuman
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
character writing facts
There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.
men evil dystopia
Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
men choices cease
When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
Hitler was a teetotalitarian.
believe government free-will
...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
men choices want
Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
hymns where-you-come remember
It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.