What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art. Anthony Burgess More Quotes by Anthony Burgess More Quotes From Anthony Burgess If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered. Anthony Burgess effortmusicalart Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing. Anthony Burgess unforgivable-sindoebelieve The state is never so efficient as when it wants money. Anthony Burgess efficientstateswant A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art. Anthony Burgess attitudemenart Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive. Anthony Burgess violenceenergylittles It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. Anthony Burgess clockworkinhumanevil 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. Anthony Burgess writingsexfiction I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing. Anthony Burgess nameswritingfirsts Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers? Anthony Burgess colonizationcolonialismreason A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist. Anthony Burgess writingmenbook If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed. Anthony Burgess disappointedworstpersons We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it. Anthony Burgess clockworkfearlesswriting I didn't think; I experimented. Anthony Burgess actionsciencethinking Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy. Anthony Burgess victorydemocracyamerica The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science. Anthony Burgess educationtwoart Hitler was a teetotalitarian. Anthony Burgess It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen. Anthony Burgess colorreallife If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil. Anthony Burgess orangelovelyevil The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk around my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers. Anthony Burgess winebrotherwise The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon. Anthony Burgess afternoonawarenessmind
