Anthony Burgess Quotes

He's like a bizarro me. One of us is working for good, and the other is Kris Kobach.

Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites!

They say there is no light without dark, no good without evil, no male without female, no right without wrong. That nothing can exist if it's direct opposite does not also exist.

The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.

Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance; inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.

There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.

For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter.

I use [Heraclitus' discovery of] enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, onesided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.

Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours.

The problem was, you couldn't have one without the other. There couldn't be a bad guy unless there was a good guy to create the standard. And there couldn't be a good guy until a bad guy showed just how far off the path he might stray.

My death and life, My bane and antidote, are both before me.

Though love and hatred are as opposites as fire and water, yet do they sometimes subsist in the breast together towards the same person; nay by their very opposition and desire to destroy each other, are they strengthened and increased.

Though the man above might say hello, expect no love from the beast below

Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they obstruct it, they are characterized as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character...tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game.

Where good and ill together blent, Wage an undying strife.

Watch what everyone else does--do the opposite. The majority is always wrong.

The tension of opposites: Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.

Everything in this world is designed to oppose your forward movement!

PMP was in an almost diametrically opposite situation to Fairfax.

Weakness is more opposed to virtue than is vice.

How could one create life with someone who represented death?

The wavering multitude is divided into opposite factions.