Quotes by Anthony Burgess

• Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.
• One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
• Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.
• The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
• The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
• The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
• To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
• It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.
• We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
• The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
• If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
• I didn't think; I experimented.
• He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
• Every dogma has its day.
• Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
• Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.
• Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
• A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
• Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
• Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.