A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.

— Anthony Burgess

And now, talking of praying, I realize sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.

— Anthony Burgess

And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get the hit than give it. If that deck had stayed I might even have like presented the other cheek.

— Anthony Burgess

And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good.

— Anthony Burgess

An eye for an eye, I say. If someone hits you hit back, do you not? Why then should not the State, very severely hit by you brutal hooligans, not hit back also? But the new view is to say no. The new view is that we turn the bad into the good. All of which seems to me grossly unjust.

— Anthony Burgess

A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.

— Anthony Burgess

A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offense against property: it is an offense against life.

— Anthony Burgess

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

— Anthony Burgess

Badness is of the self, the one, the or me on our odd knocked, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and adopt. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.

— Anthony Burgess

But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, then the governing machine grows remote, impersonal, even inhuman. It takes money from us for purposes we do not seem to sanction; it treats us as abstract statistics; it controls an army; it supports a police force whose function does not always appear to be protective.

— Anthony Burgess