Anthony Burgess citations (299 citations, Page 3)

Anthony Burgess: 299 citations0 J'aime

Anthony Burgess Citations

“Le bien est un choix. Tout homme incapable de choisir cesse d'être un homme.”

Anthony Burgess livre L'Orange mécanique

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess: Citations en anglais

“…all heroes and heroines trying to approximate, through barriers of pigmentation, to the Hebraico-Caucasian norm of Hollywood”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

“I come here to your beautiful country -’ Mr Raj saw through the window bare branches, coil after coil of dirty clouds, washing on neighbour lines, forlorn pecking birds, a distant brace of gasometers. ‘- your beautiful country, I say,’ he said defiantly. ‘…So far I have had mixed career. Fights and insults, complete lack of sexual sustenance - most necessary to men in prime of life - and inability to find accommodation commensurate with social position and academic attainments…”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“Some young men could not afford to marry or were statutorily forbidden to do so, and then their visits to Japanese brothels engendered guilt as well as VD. The official attitude to taking brown mistresses was always ambivalent. It let the side down, but a sleeping dictionary was the only way to learn the language. Mr Butcher is good on all this, and he gives such tables as one headed ‘Ethnicity of Women from whom European Men Treated at the Sultan Street Clinic Contracted Venereal Disease, 1927-1931.’ The girls of Siam were the great infectresses, but the Malays came a close second. The Japanese, who had regular medical inspections and lived in brothels cleaner than hotels, were down with the Eurasians to 0.4% in 1931. This damnable sex, by no means to be tamed by quinine or cricket. Guilt guilt guilt….”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

“That’s what it’s going to be then, brothers, as I come to the like end of this tale. You have been everywhere with your little droog Alex, suffering with him, and you have viddied some of the most grahzny bratchnies old Bog ever made, all on to your old droog Alex. And all it was was that I was young. But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“…jumped-up commercials pretending, too late, to be the ruling class..”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“Lydgate opened the sort of letter…”My dear husband I very good…I come in flying ship…we be very happy…love.” It was as satisfactory a letter as he had ever received from a woman.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

“Vorpal had the trick of adding a Malay enclitic to his utterances. This also had power to irritate, especially in the mornings. It irritated Nabby Adams that this should irritate him, but somewhere at the back of his brain was the contempt of the man learned in languages for the silly show-off, jingling the small change of ‘wallah’ and charpoy…”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“…Women I do not much care for myself - I prefer little Greek shepherd-boys…”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Tremor of Intent (1966)

“…a victim of bad medicine, bad air, bad food, farcical education, a despicable popular culture.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, 1985 (1978)

“Disgusting, ridiculous, when other people did it.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

“I knew im, she knew im, e knew im, we all knew im.’ After this paradigm, which impressed his hearers, he paused. ‘E was a customer ere. Not perhaps one of the best customers. Not like Roger Alliwell ere oo drinks whisky to the tune of near one bottle a day, which is good for the ouse and, as far as we can see, does imself no arm. But e was a customer, loyal to the ouse, regular in attendance, and that’s all we ask of any man or woman for that matter. Well, now e’s gone. We’re sorry e’s gone. You’re sorry e’s gone. I’m sorry e’s gone. And we can’t say much more than that. Now the question is: is e gone to a better place? I don’t know the answer to that, nor do you, nor does she. Perhaps e knows,’ said Ted, shrugging towards the vicar, ‘because it’s is job to know. But the rest of us don’t know. Right. But I say this. E done is best for all. Never a ard word come out of that man’s art. Right. Well loved e was and for all is faults we would love im still, if e was still alive. But e’s dead now and we wish im all the best in is new destination. And I can’t say no fairer than that.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“Men are influenced by big loud empty words, styes which swell the eyelids and impede vision of the truth.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965)

“I should want to go home, like Fenella. I should be so tired of the shambles here, the obscurantism, the colour-prejudice, the laziness and ignorance, as to desire nothing better than a headship in a cold stone country school in England. But I love this country. I feel protective towards it. Sometimes just before dawn breaks, I feel that somehow I enclose it, contain it. I feel that it needs me. This is absurd, because snakes and scorpions are ready to bite me, a drunken Tamil is prepared to knife me, the Chinese in the town would like to spit at me, some day a Malay boy will run amok and try to tear me apart. But it doesn’t matter. I want to live here; I want to be wanted. Despite the sweat, despite the fever, the prickly heat, the mosquitoes, the terrorists, the fools at the bar of the club, despite Fenella.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“Sit like a fool then, crassly emptying
Glass after wineglass in some foul tavern,
Watching the night and its candles gutter,
Snoring at sunrise.
In England now the wind blows high
And clouds brush rudely at the sky;
The blood runs thinly through my frame,
I half-caress the hearthstone’s flame,
Oppressed by autumn’s desolate cry.
Then homesick for the south am I,
For where the lucky swallows fly,
But each warm land is just a name
In England now.
The luckless workers I espy
With chins dipped low and collars high,
Walk into winter, do not blame
The shifting globe. A gust of shame
Represses my unmanly sigh
In England now.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

English Literature: A Survey for Students.
Poetry

“…enjoyed Dravidian transports.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Tremor of Intent (1966)

“…the whole world here breathed easy concupiscence…”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

“it excites the pancreas to fresh efforts”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“an Australian…. They have suffered under the yoke of the English…”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

“…Just you bloody hypocrites with your four wives and your ten thousand houris in heaven?…”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)

“Why then are the arts and sciences important? I suppose with the sciences we could say that the answer is obvious: we have radium, penicillin, television and recorded sound, motor-cars and aircraft, air-conditioning and central heating. But these achievements have never been the primary intention of science; they are a sort of by-product, the things that emerge only when the scientist has performed his main task. That task is simply stated: to be curious, to keep on asking the question 'Why?' and not to be satisfied till an answer has been found. The scientist is curious about the universe: he wants to know why water boils at one temperature and freezes at another; why cheese is different from chalk; why one person behaves differently from another. Not only 'Why?' but ‘What?' What is salt made of? What are the stars? What is the constitution of all matter? The answers to these questions do not necessarily malke our lives any easier. The answer to one question—'Can the atom be split?' - has made our lives somewhat harder. But the questions have to be asked. It is man's job to be curious; it is man's job to try to find out the truth about the world about us, to answer the big question 'What is the world really like?”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

“Stamping around, waiting, I cursed England aloud, hands dug deep into pockets, dancing to the wind that knocked in vain at the Sunday shops. Cigarette-packets, football fixtures, bus-tickets sailed by in dust-ghosts of Saturday. A woman with a puce face and a blancmange-coloured prayer-book was waiting also for The Priest and Pig, and she looked puce disapproval at me. Twenty minutes late, the bus yawned in from town, near-empty, and it swallowed us in a gape of Sunday ennui. So we sundayed along, rattling and creaking in Sunday hollowness, I upstairs, tearing my elevenpenny ticket while I read the prospectus of Winter Commercial Classes stuck on the window.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“Around them the gawping locals sat, amazed with an amazement that never grew less…”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“…reality’s always dull, you know…”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“Pornography…. the reader panting, eventually masturbating”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Non-Fiction, A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

“He would milk the white man…. The white man had more money than sense.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

“…an Empire now crashing about their ears. The Sikh smiled at the vanity of human aspirations.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

“She is a goddess,’ said Ambrose, drunkenly and stoutly. ‘…And she wants me. She’s the pursuer…She’s the epitome of woman, not,’ he said, ‘not a second-hand bundle of coy erogeneity draped,’ he said, ‘in an all-too-diaphanous robe,’ he said, ‘of pudeur.”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Eve of St. Venus (1964)

“…as the cinema shows us, they are much more accessible and, for that matter, much more wanton than our own women”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

“Grimaldi and a sixteen-year-old girl still at Hollywood High. He was a good journalist but he was going to die soon. At fifty he was on a bottle and a half of Californian brandy a day and four packs of Lucky Strike. His clothes smelt as though they were seeped in tobacco juice. His white forlock was stained with it…”

Help us translate this quote

Anthony Burgess

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

Auteurs similaires

George Orwell27

écrivain britannique None

Terry Pratchett82

écrivain britannique None

Elias Canetti8

écrivain britannique germanophone None

Arthur Conan Doyle15

écrivain et médecin écossais None

Aldous Huxley43

Romancier et essayiste britannique None

Vladimir Nabokov39

écrivain None

Richard Bach8

écrivain américain None

Richard Dawkins8

biologiste et éthologiste britannique None

Cesare Pavese6

écrivain italien None

Kurt Vonnegut29

écrivain américain None