Anthony Burgess Video

When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

A film is -- or should be -- more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

I never had to choose a subject my subject rather chose me.

Oedipus Rex.

If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.

Human beings cannot stand too much reality.

It is a little embarrassing that after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.

My guess is that mainstream channels will play a leading role for another decade, and probably far longer. Some content may be fragmented into itsy-bitsy bites delivered via mobiles, but programmes as we know them will remain central.

The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so! To my own Gods I go. It may be they shall give me greater ease than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.

You can't wait for the phone to ring. You have to ring them.

I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.

Time gives good advice.

My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know.

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.

Most of us, swimming against the tides of trouble the world knows nothing about, need only a bit of praise or encouragement - and we will make the goal.

We all want to be happy, and we're all going to die. You might say those are the only two unchallengeably true facts that apply to every human being on this planet.

The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master.

They are always saying God loves us. If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upwards on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

Nothing is lost yet, nothing broken, and yet the cold blue word is spoken: say goodbye now to the Sun, the days of love and leaves are done.

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require.

Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.

Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives. It is scarcely to be wondered at if the public is very nearly as slow in the uptake.

I don't know whether I like it, but it's what I meant.

I love cats. I love their grace and their elegance. I love their independence and their arrogance, and the way they lie and look at you, summing you up, surely to your detriment, with that unnerving, unwinking, appraising stare.

I think that one of the qualifications of artists should be a vow of celibacy. They should be confined to ruining only their own lives.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

The social kiss is an exchange of insincerity between two combatants on the field of social advancement. It places hygiene before affection and condescension before all else.