In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.

— Anthony Burgess

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

— Anthony Burgess

It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.

— Anthony Burgess

It may not be nice to be good, 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you, I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

— Anthony Burgess

It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.

— Anthony Burgess

I was always on my odd knock.

— Anthony Burgess

I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence nor just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.

— Anthony Burgess

John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.

— Anthony Burgess

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

— Anthony Burgess

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

— Anthony Burgess