Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil.

— Anthony Burgess

Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.

— Anthony Burgess

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

— Anthony Burgess

Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Where I see the infamy I seek to erase it. Party names mean nothing. The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded-.

— Anthony Burgess

So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horror show chocks, but he still went on singing.

— Anthony Burgess

Suddenly, I vid died what I had to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.

— Anthony Burgess

That's the law, son. But you were never much of a one for following the law.

— Anthony Burgess

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- "A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986

— Anthony Burgess

The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.

— Anthony Burgess

The downtrodden who are the great creators of slang hurl pithiness and color at poverty and oppression.

— Anthony Burgess