Donna Rosenberg > Donna's Quotes

“Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.”
― Anthony Burgess, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Essays

“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.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“What's it going to be then, eh?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”
― anthony burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“When the State withers, humanity flowers.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.”
― Anthony Burgess

“Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“English is a curiously expressive language. Womb, room, tomb. It sums up living in three words.”
― Anthony Burgess, The End of the World News

“Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“Life is, of course, terrible.”
― Anthony Burgess

“People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?”
― Anthony Burgess

“In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

“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, A Clockwork Orange

“On my website there's a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind."

I've always found that inspiring because the written word, as an art form, is unlike any other: movies, TV, music, they're shared experiences, but books aren't like that. The relationship between a writer and a reader is utterly unique to those two individuals. The world that forms in your head as you read a book will be slightly different to that experienced by every other reader. Anywhere. Ever. Reading is very personal, a communication from one mind to another, something which can't be exactly copied, or replicated, or directly shared.

If I read the work of, say, one of the great Victorian novelists, it's like a gift from the past, a momentary connection to another's thoughts. Their ideas are down on paper, to be picked up by me, over a century later. Writers can speak individually to readers across a year, or ten years, or a thousand.

That's why I love books.”
― Simon Cheshire