ANTHONY BURGESS

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.

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

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

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

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

I didn't think; I experimented.

The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

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

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Every dogma has its day.

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

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.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

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

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.

The Presidency is a Tudor monarchy with telephones.

I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in.

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.