Anthony Burgess

“It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.”

“Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

“The essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.”

“Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.”

“Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.”

“And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. 'You felt ill this afternoon,' he said, 'because you're getting better. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all.”

“How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.”

“We were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.”

“And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.”

“Go on, do me in, you bastard cowards, I don't want to live anyway, not in a stinking world like this one.' I told Dim to lay off a bit then, because it used to interest me sometimes to slooshy what some of these starry decreps had to say about life and the world. I said: 'Oh. And what's stinking about it?”

“There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.”

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

“What's it going to be then, eh?”

“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”

“I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.”

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

“Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.”

“What I do I do because I like to do.”

“Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.”

“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”

“Civilised my syphilised yarbles.”

“Then I wanted to sick up the gluey pie I'd had before the start of the evening, But I couldn't stand the sort of veshch, sicking all over the floor, so I held it back.”

“I was always on my oddy knocky.”

“I was cured all right.”

“And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.”

“Alex like groweth up, Oh Yes.”

“There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.”

“The next morning I woke up at oh eight oh oh hours, my brothers, and as I still felt shagged and fagged and fashed and bashed and my glazzies were stuck together real horrorshow with sleepglue, I thought I would not go to school.”

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

“If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others”

“It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.”

“Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?”

“You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.”

“It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.”

“Then we slooshied.”

“Then I looked at its top sheet, and there was the name – 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 preaching goloss: ‘—The attempt to impose upon 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—”

“But what I do I do because I like to do.”

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

“It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. ”

“If I had died it would have been even better for you political bratchnies, would it not, pretending and treacherous droogs as you are.' But all that came out was er er er.”

“This must be a real horrorshow film if you're so keen on my viddying it.”

“When the State withers, humanity flowers.”

“I am instructed by the Home Secretary to read out the following. . . . It is a prayer devised by the Ministry of Propaganda. . . . ‘It is conceivable that the forces of death which at present are ravaging the esculent life of this planet have intelligence, in which case we beseech them to leave off. It we have done wrong--allowing in our blindness natural impulse to overcome reason--we are, of course, heartily sorry. But we submit that we have already suffered sufficiently for this wrong and we firmly resolve never to sin again. Amen.”

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

“We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.”

“Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. 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 round 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.”

“I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.”

“Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God's. The sixth day is for football”

“But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there. ... And all that cal.”

“It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.”