Anthony Burgess Quotes

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. - from the introduction of the 1986 Norton edition

All stories are just stories of a character changing.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character. I love being able to see a character go through something and to learn.

As a character, it's very interesting to play someone who wants to change their life and have him change it.

If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation.

In dramatic writing, the very essence is character change. The character at the end is not the same as he was at the beginning. He's changed-psychologically, maybe even physically.

Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey.

Many foxes grow gray but few grow good.

Kabbalah is all about change. It isn't about being proud of our good qualities: the wisdom is about transforming our darkness into light.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

With a lot of comedies, the characters go on a journey, and they come back, and they're the exact same people.

I am a big proponent of character arcs that show us how people change over time.

I think all my life's story is condensed in my face. It is neither innocent nor coy. It speaks volumes.

I was attempting to write the story of my life. It wasn't so much about plot. It was much more about character.

We are apt to think that everything that happens to us is to be turned into useful teaching; it is to be turned into something better than teaching, into character. We shall find that the spheres God brings us into are not meant to teach us something but to make us something.

One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

The most important task of your life is not what you do, but who you become.

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

I have learned God doesn't always change those people we want Him to change; instead, He often uses them to change us.

In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.

In order for good to blossom it must be cultivated and exercised by constant practice, and to be truly righteous there is required a daily pruning of the evil growth of our characters by a daily repen- tance from sin.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

I write about relationships and I try to create real-life characters.

Within ten days thou wilt seem a god to those to whom thou art now a beast and an ape, if thou wilt return to thy principles and the worship of reason.