Anthony Burgess
Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic
A Clockwork Orange
(1962).
He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy (
The Long Day Wanes
) on the dying days of empire in the east. The
Enderby
quartet concerns a poet and his muse.
Nothing like the Sun
re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with
Earthly Powers
, a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises
Language Made Plain
and
A Mouthful of Air
. His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted
Cyrano de Bergerac
,
Oedipus the King
, and
Carmen
for the stage. He scripted
Jesus of Nazareth
and
Moses the Lawgiver
for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in
Quest for Fire
. He composed the
Sinfoni Melayu
, the
Symphony (No. 3) in C
, and the opera
Blooms of Dublin
.
“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.”
“Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions, when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.”
“It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321.”
“Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.”
“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.”
“When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”
“It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”
“Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!”
“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.”
“A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.”
“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”
“I said, smiling very wide and droogie: ‘Well, if it isn’t fat stinking billygoat Billyboy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou.’ And then we started.”
“You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured! I was cured alright.”
“That's what it's going to be then, brothers, as I come to the like end of this tale. You have been everywhere with your little droog Alex, suffering with him, and you have viddied some of the most grahzny bratchnies old Bog ever made, all on to your old droog Alex. And all it was was that I was young. But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.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 young earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lipmusic brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that call.”
“Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?”
“The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.”