Anthony Burgess Quotes

I'm not good at future planning. I don't plan at all. I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow. I don't have a day planner and I don't have a diary. I completely live in the now, not in the past, not in the future.

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.

The whole idea is not to figure out what you should do that will matter, but to make each thing you do reflect the values you want, because we don't know what's going to matter in the future

The funny thing is that I'm not a planner. I have no idea what I want to do in the interim of that 50 years, but I tell ya: That's where you'll find me in my last performance.

The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.

In the weeks and months ahead, my task is to show I have the new ideas, the vision and the experience to earn the trust of the British people.

I naturally believe there will be a future, but I do not waste my time imagining its radiant beauty. ... It seems to me that we ought to think first about the present. Even if the present is desperately dark, I do not wish to leave it. Will tomorrow be free from darkness? We'll talk about that tomorrow.

Every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled.

The future will soon be a thing of the past.

Instead of just looking back, whiplash-style, I can assume there's something else coming. Time just folds over itself, like origami.

The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.

Quite truthfully, I have no idea how much the pension is worth because I have never contemplated retiring.

The Present only has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory only, but things to come have no being at all; the Future but a fiction of the mind.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

Because she was seventeen, and still alive, against thousands of years' worth of odds.Because she knew enough to fear what the future would bring.

The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.

Forecasting is very difficult, especially when it involves the future.

of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.

Never say never. In your life you never know what's going to happen next.

How hard it is to project oneself into the future. We are always prone to think of the conditions which are with us today as being permanent conditions.

The idea of sustainability can imply there is one perfect, unchanging future, if only we could work out how to get there. Resilience might be more useful, in that it assumes a dynamic environment and that perfection is impossible. You need to design systems to accommodate failure rather than eliminate it. By trying to be perfect, many visions of sustainability are quite brittle

Tomorrow never comes.

The uncertainty of our future is nothing more than a fog of breath on a windowpane.

It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.

A dangerous fallacy is to repudiate freedom in favor of an unknown future. What else but our own sturdy reliance on freedom can explain the unexampled record this country has made? In a period scarcely twice my own lifetime it has risen from nothingness to become the world's greatest power. It has become the ark of the covenant of freedom.