Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Anthony Burgess

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

Anthony Burgess

love relationship life

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

Anthony Burgess

modern solitude world

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.

Anthony Burgess

choices evil order

I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.

Anthony Burgess

nonsense human-nature

Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.

Anthony Burgess

sanity mad world

Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.

Anthony Burgess

merit doe men

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.

Anthony Burgess

celebration hymns where-you-come

...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

Anthony Burgess

free-will government believe

The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.

Anthony Burgess

violence book sex

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

Anthony Burgess

wall hard-work art

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.

Anthony Burgess

writing character facts

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?

Anthony Burgess

choices doe men

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

Anthony Burgess

uplifting literature philosophy

Every dogma has its day.

Anthony Burgess

dogma life-and-love

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

Anthony Burgess

dystopia evil men

Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.

Anthony Burgess

birthright

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

Anthony Burgess

records language imagination

... A CLOCKWORK ORANGE- and I said: 'That's a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?' Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high type preaching goloss: '- The attempt to impose upon a man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen-

Anthony Burgess

orange law men

When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.

Anthony Burgess

be-a-man choices men

When the State withers, humanity flowers.

Anthony Burgess

states flower humanity