“In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“I must give up seeing people, I told myself.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“Have you by chance brought some real British tea? Twining’s? Or from Jackson’s in Piccadilly?”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“But don’t think that it’s a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It’s our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it’s cold outside. But it’s not the cold’s fault that it’s cold.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“In other words, I heard life going on, and it was a comfort.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“...I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless...”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
“The religious impulse can be very dangerous. It damages, sometimes permanently.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from Earthly Powers
Anthony Burgess
Born place: in Harpurhey, England, The United Kingdom
Born date February 25, 1917
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“To be a good spouse, wife or husband, the wilfulness of Ganga needs to be balanced with the serenity of Shiva. Only then will the river of marriage create fertile riverbanks”
― Devdutt Pattanaik, quote from Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana
“I may have lit the match, but it was karma that kept the fire blazing.”
― quote from White Girl Problems
“In this chapter, I want to focus on the really big crimes that have been committed by atheist groups and governments. In the past hundred years or so, the most powerful atheist regimes—Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany—have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. Stalin was responsible for around twenty million deaths, produced through mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, population relocation and starvation, and so on. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s authoritative recent study Mao: The Unknown Story attributes to Mao Zedong’s regime a staggering seventy million deaths.4 Some China scholars think Chang and Halliday’s numbers are a bit high, but the authors present convincing evidence that Mao’s atheist regime was the most murderous in world history. Stalin’s and Mao’s killings—unlike those of, say, the Crusades or the Thirty Years’ War—were done in peacetime and were performed on their fellow countrymen. Hitler comes in a distant third with around ten million murders, six million of them Jews. So far, I haven’t even counted the assassinations and slayings ordered by other Soviet dictators like Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and so on. Nor have I included a host of “lesser” atheist tyrants: Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceaus̹escu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il. Even these “minor league” despots killed a lot of people. Consider Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Within this four-year period Pol Pot and his revolutionary ideologues engaged in systematic mass relocations and killings that eliminated approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million people. In fact, Pol Pot killed a larger percentage of his countrymen than Stalin and Mao killed of theirs.5 Even so, focusing only on the big three—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—we have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, quote from What's So Great About Christianity
“I mean, what are you going to do to him for shooting your dog?” “I will do nothing. I won’t hurt my brother. He acted like a child. He did a bad thing. But he is drunk and his head is not working well. He should not have hurt my dog. It is like my child.” Even when provoked, as Kaaboogí was now, the Pirahãs were able to respond with patience, love, and understanding, in ways rarely matched in any other culture I have encountered.”
― Daniel L. Everett, quote from Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
“The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.”
― Susan Sontag, quote from Against Interpretation and Other Essays
An American Tragedy
Three Men in a Boat
The Immortal Life of...
The White Tiger
A Room of One's Own
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