Anthony Burgess Quotes

• Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Art

• The heresy of an age of reason. I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Age

• Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Life

• I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Wish

• To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Create

• You were not put on this Earth just to get in touch with god.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in God

  Tags in Earth

• The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Life

• In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Reason

• Life’s only choosing when to die. Life’s a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It’s a tremendous relief not to have to choose.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Death, Life

• A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Choice

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

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Money

• Goodness comes from within… Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Goodness

• Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Youth

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

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Government

• It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Good

• Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions, when it ceases to be dangerous you don’t want it.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Art

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

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Reading

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

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing

• If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Worst

• Death comes along like a gas bill one can’t pay—and that’s all one can say about it.

  Anthony Burgess

  Topics in Death

Anthony Burgess (28)

Birth:	25th February, 1917
Death:	22nd November, 1993
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Composer, Critic, Novelist, Poet, Writer

About

John Anthony Burgess Wilson who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess was an English writer and composer. From relatively modest beginnings in a Manchester Catholic family in the North of England, he eventually became one of the best known English literary figures of the latter half of the twentieth century.

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