By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange - meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with color and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

— Anthony Burgess

Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?

— Anthony Burgess

Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance.

— Anthony Burgess

Dreams go by opposites I was once told.

— Anthony Burgess

Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.

— Anthony Burgess

Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

— Anthony Burgess

I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.

— Anthony Burgess

I didn't think I experimented.

— Anthony Burgess

... I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless...

— Anthony Burgess

I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother.

— Anthony Burgess