Anthony Burgess Quotes

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

Is adult entertainment killing our children? or is killing our children entertaining our adults?

Sex and obscenity are not synonymous. Obscene material is material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest.

Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop it being brought in from outside.

He’s a filthy Frenchman who grew rich writing pornographic literature.

Books are feeders of brothels.

Morals, not Art or Literature.

The commerce in sexual stimulation and auto-eroticism, for its own sake, unrelated to marriage, procreation, or familial relations is an evil, an obscenity... detrimental to the health and morality of the state

The French are nice people. I allow them to sing and to write, and they allow me to do whatever I like.

Evil communication, wicked, profane, impure, filthy and obscene songs, composures, writings or print corrupt the mind and are all incentive to all manner of impurities and debaucheries.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it

It is obvious that "obscenity" is not a term capable of exact legal definition; in the practice of the Courts, it means "anything that shocks the magistrate.

The history of the application of laws designed to suppress the obscene demonstrates convincingly that the power of government can be invoked under them against great art or literature, scientific treatises, or works exciting social controversy. Mistakes of the past prove that there is a strong countervailing interest to be considered in the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics.

The shield of Achilles was a great work of art; Homer devoted an entire chant of the Iliad to describing it. I suppose that the Americans would cast and mould such a shield in a few hours

Photographs have always been the tar baby of censors and obscenity laws. Literature can certainly (if it's any good) conjure up the most pornographic imagination. But photographs dare to be real. No matter how contrived or constructed they are, there's that damn body staring you in the face.

I don't know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else's erotica that you don't like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they've always reflected it in their art. End of story.

Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.

At the moment my art is situated between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it's all about.

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

Poetry is music written for the human voice.

Why then we should drop into poetry.

Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

there is art and there is official art, there always has been and there always will be.